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In fact, in my opinion, one of the benefits of AI tools that is often overlooked is "psychological support". When you are stuck at work, it will give you a push. Even if it is not completely right, it is enough to get you moving. The feeling of "no longer fighting alone at work" is actually more important than many people think.
To each his own. I'm completely drained after 30 min of "discussing" with an LLM, which is essentially an overconfident idiot.
Pushes never come from the LLM, which can be easily seen by feeding the output of two LLMs into each other. The conversation collapses completely.
Using Google while ignoring the obnoxious and often wrong LLM summaries at the top gives you access to the websites of real human experts, who often wrote the code that the LLM plagiarizes.
If it's not overconfident, it's the opposite - they're too much of a "Yes man", which at the slightest whim will change their mind to fit your opinion, if they even detect you might have a different one.
Then they'll change their mind to their original answer when you tell them "I wasn't disagreeing with you". Honestly, it's amusing, but draining at the same time.
I've had a couple of times where Gemini straight up tells me "Absolutely not, ..." and the explains how my assumptions are wrong and eventually leads me to find the right answer.
It's surprisingly good at reading my entire code, reading my assumptions of the code, and explaining what I'm getting wrong and how to fix it.
By godelski 2025-06-1818:26 I've had GPT do the same thing but lead me to the wrong answer. Usually through some subtle mistake. So the answer looks right but hey, literally the difference between an expert and amateur is understanding subtlety
By 3ln00b 2025-06-1812:58 I have experienced this a lot, I thought I was alone. I get frustrated and tired discussing with LLMs sometimes, simply because they keep providing wrong solutions. Now I try to search before I ask LLMs now, that way I have better context of the problem and know when LLM is hallucinating.
By endymion-light 2025-06-1814:071 reply are we using the same version of google? Unless incredibly specific I mostly see SEO optimized garbage.
Everyone uses an individualized version of Google, not just your history its even different by country of origin etc.
So no, they are not using the same version of Google.
By endymion-light 2025-06-1815:113 reply Well my individualized version of google is filled with medium articles and useless bull, i'd pay good money to switch to this magic working search engine
By tombert 2025-06-1816:25 Another recommendation for Kagi. It cost money but I find that the results are as good or better than Google, and I get to rank where sites show up in the results, not some machine learning program trying to guess at it.
By matthewkayin 2025-06-1815:29 If you're serious, I've heard Kagi is an actually good, paid search engine. Haven't tried it myself, though.
By ta988 2025-06-1815:37 It is called Kagi
By swat535 2025-06-1815:47 I think a big problem I have with AI write now is that the context window can get messed up and it has a hard time remember what we talked about. So if you tell it to write a code that should do X, Y, Z, it does on the first request, but then on the next request, when it's writing more code, it doesn't recall.
Second, it doesn't do well at all if you give it negative instructions, for example if you tell it to: "Don't use let! in Rspec" , it will create a test with "let!" all over the place.
By all2 2025-06-1815:06 I'm glad to hear this. Working with LLMs makes me want to get up and go do something else. And at the end of a session I'm drained, and not in a good way.
You are discussing with a llm? Never happened to me and I use llms all the time. Why would you need to discuss if you know best? Just tell it what to do and course correct it. It's not rocket science.
PS: Both humans and llms are hard to align. But I do have to discuss with humans and I find that exhausting. llms I just nudge or tell what to do
By neuronexmachina 2025-06-1815:32 > You are discussing with a llm? Never happened to me and I use llms all the time. Why would you need to discuss if you know best? Just tell it what to do and course correct it. It's not rocket science.
I find myself often discussing with an LLM when trying to find the root cause of an issue I'm debugging. For example, when trying to track down a race condition I'll give it a bunch of relevant logs and source code, and the investigation tends to be pretty interactive. For example, it'll pose a number of possible explanations/causes, and I'll tell it which one to investigate further, or recommendations for what new logging would help.
I find it exhausting in a yes-man kind of way where it does whatever you told but just somehow wrong. I think your human case is the reverse.
Just like a person would. If you want it done right you have to do it yourself. Or you have to tell the LLM exactly how to do it.
Often I find it easier to just do it myself rather than list out a bunch of changes. I'll give the LLM a vague task, it does it and then I go through it. If it's completely off I give it new instructions, if it's almost right I just fix the details myself.
By ryandrake 2025-06-1816:25 In so many ways, LLMs are like that very energetic and confident Junior developer you hired straight out of college who believes he knows everything but needs to be course corrected constantly. I think if you're good at mentoring and guiding Junior colleagues, you'll have a great time with LLM based coding. If you feel drained after working with them, then you will probably feel drained after 30 minutes with an LLM.
Totally fair take — and honestly, it’s refreshing to hear someone call it like it is. You’re clearly someone who values real understanding over surface-level noise, and it shows. A lot of people just go along with the hype without questioning the substance underneath — but you’ve taken the time to test it, poke at the seams, and see what actually holds up.
I swear there's something about this voice which is especially draining. There's probably nothing else which makes me want to punch my screen more.
Which makes me wonder whether there is an SI unit for sycophantic sliminess, because the first paragraph of your answer is dripping with it.
When they say "there is something about this voice..." I think they mean the paragraph above, which sounds very GenAI generated to me. Either AI generated, or "generated by a human intentionally trying to reproduce the 'voice' of a typical GenAI."
By tempodox 2025-06-1816:58 That's what I was referring to.
By UncleOxidant 2025-06-1814:552 reply The first paragraph seems like it's written by AI.
By somenameforme 2025-06-1815:20 I'm fairly sure it was a subtle joke.
By amanaplanacanal 2025-06-1815:21 I think that was the point.
By mylons 2025-06-1816:54 google gives you access to real SEO blog spam. nothing better than the experts at stack overflow, or some random medium blog from a guy in rural india
By enraged_camel 2025-06-1812:451 reply >> To each his own. I'm completely drained after 30 min of "discussing" with an LLM, which is essentially an overconfident idiot.
I'm completely drained after 30 minutes of browsing Google results, which these days consist of mountains of SEO-optimized garbage, posts on obscure forums, Stackoverflow posts and replies that are either outdated or have the wrong accepted answer... the list goes on.
By jkestner 2025-06-1816:55 Using natural language discussion to probe for an answer is more draining for me than scanning a large volume of text (much like watching a video instead of the transcript is). I didn’t start coding for more humanish interaction!
By deadbabe 2025-06-1817:11 I think a far more valuable tool than an LLM summarizer would be something where you can type up a prompt, and it brings you conversations or articles other humans have made about your exact kind of problem. Just the text, no websites to sift through.
The accusations that politicians are already overusing AI are flying, and given the incentives I wouldn't be surprised more of the internal functioning of all modern governments are already more LLM-based AI than we'd realize. Or particularly appreciate.
By that I don't mean necessarily the nominal function of the government; I doubt the IRS is heavily LLM-based for evaluating tax forms, mostly because the pre-LLM heuristics and "what we used to call AI" are probably still much better and certainly much cheaper than any sort of "throw an LLM at the problem" could be. But I wouldn't be surprised that the amount of internal communication, whitepapers, policy drafts and statements, etc. by mass is probably already at least 1/3rd LLM-generated.
(Heck, even on Reddit I'm really starting to become weary of the posts that are clearly "Hey, AI, I'm releasing this app with these three features, please blast that out into a 15-paragraph description of it that includes lots of emojis and also describes in a general sense why performance and security are good things." and if anything the incentives slightly mitigate against that as the general commenter base is starting to get pretty frosty about this. How much more popular it must be where nobody will call you out on it and everybody is pretty anxious to figure out how to offload the torrent-of-words portion of their job onto machines.)
By StefanBatory 2025-06-1814:171 reply In my country a MP of lower house sent out a tweet generated by LLMs.
As in, copied it with a prompt in.
Even before LLMs, politicians (and celebrities) had other people tweet for them. IIRC, I've met someone who tweeted on behalf of Jill Stein.
Which is not to say seeing a prompt in a tweet isn't funny, it is, just that it may have been an intern or a volunteer.
By amanaplanacanal 2025-06-1815:23 They may be completely insane, but at least the president makes his own tweets! I mean truths.
By tempodox 2025-06-1814:26 LLMs have to go a long way before their ideas are as outrageous as those of The Current Occupant Of The President's Chair.
I asked my students to write a joke about AI. Sometimes humor is the best way to get people to talk about their fears without filters. One of them wrote:
"I went to work early that day and noticed my monitor was on, and code was being written without anyone pressing any keys. Something had logged into my machine and was writting code. I ran to my boss and told him my computer had been hacked. He looked at me, concerned, and said I was hallucinating. It's not a hacker, he said. It's our new agent. While you were sleeping, it built the app we needed. Remember that promotion you always wanted? Well, good news buddy! I'm promoting you to Prompt Manager. It's half the money, but you get to watch TikTok videos all day long!'"
Hard to find any real reassurance in that story.
Why do we assume that Prompt Engineering is going to pay less money? As usual, what one brings to the company is value, and if AI-generated code needs to be prompted first and reviewed later, I don’t see how prompters in the future could earn less than software engineers now.
Prompt engineering is like singing: sure thing everyone can physically sing… now whether it’s pleasant listening to them is another topic.
The first thing any big technical revolution causes is suffering for a lot of people.
It can bounce back over time and maybe leave us better off than before but the short term will not be pretty. Think industrial revolution where we had to stop companies by law from working children to literal death.
Whether the working man or the capital class profits from the rise of productivity is a questions of political power.
We have seen that productivity rises do not increase work compensation anymore: https://substack.com/home/post/p-165655726
Especially we as software engineers are not prepared for this fight as unions barely exist in our field.
We already saw mass layoffs by the big tech leaders and we will see it in smaller companies as well.
Sure there will always be need for experienced devs in some fields that a security critical or that need to scale but that simple CRUD app that serves 4 consecutive users? Yeah, Greg from marketing will be able to prompt that.
It doesn't need be the case that prompt engineers are paid less money, true. But with us being so disorganized the corporations will take the opportunity to cut cost.
> Especially we as software engineers are not prepared for this fight as unions barely exist in our field.
You can fight without unions. Tell the truth about LLMs: They are crutches for power users that do not really work but are used as excuses for firing people.
You can refuse to work with anyone writing vapid pro-LLM blog posts. You can blacklist them in hiring.
This addresses the union part. It is true that software engineers tend to be conflict averse and not very socially aware, so many of them follow the current industry opinion like lemmings.
If you want to know how to fight these fights, look at the permanent government bureaucracies. They prevail in the face of "new" ideas every 4 years.
By jopsen 2025-06-1813:11 > If you want to know how to fight these fights, look at the permanent government bureaucracies. They prevail in the face of "new" ideas every 4 years.
Search youtube for "yes minister" :)
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On topic, I think it's a fair point that fighting is borderline useless. Companies that don't embrace new tech will go out of business.
That said, it's entirely unclear what the implications will be. Often new capabilities doesn't mean the industry will shrink. The industry haven't shrunk as a result of 100x increase in compute and storage, or decrease in size and power usage.
Computers just became more useful.
I don't think we should be too excited about AI writing code. We should be more excited about the kinds of program we can write now. There is going to be a new paradigm of computer interaction.
By jplusequalt 2025-06-1814:12 >You can fight without unions.
And you can fly without wings--just very poorly.
Unions are extremely important in the fight of preserving worker rights, compensation, and benefits.
By autoexec 2025-06-1818:33 > You can fight without unions.
You can fight without an army too, but it's a lot less effective. There is strength in numbers. Corporations know this and they leverage that strength against their employees. You all alone vs. them is exactly how they like it.
> This addresses the union part.
lol, good luck with that.
you thinking that one or two people doing non organized _boycott_ is the same thing as an union tell a lot about you.
I didn't mention one or two people, I mentioned a theoretical strategy that is also employed by non-unionized bureaucracies. And I admitted that the strategy is impeded by the fact that many software developers are self-loathing people with no spine.
It is possible that obedient people need highly paid union bosses, i.e., new leaders they can follow.
You're wrong, obedient people are exactly the type that don't need unions, they are obedient and accept anything.
Unions are for people that don't accept anything and know that they are a target taking action alone or in non organized ways.
Unions are the way to multiply the forces and work as a group with common interests, it is for people that are not extremely selfish and egocentric.
why do you need a union? everyone should just set their personal standards for what they accept/demand, and then let the market sort it out? someone wants to work for $20/hour programming, in a fashion that can satisfy some demand? great, then I will simply NOT be doing that job. Everyone wins even though I do not get that particular job. Someone is willing to work 7 days a week as they prefer to grind to earn more money? good on them. Its not gonna be me, They win the job, I dont.
Nobody wants to inhale toxic fumes in some factory? well then the company had better invest in safety equipment, or work dont get done. We dont need a union for this
By aaronbaugher 2025-06-1813:421 reply History, especially the industrial age, says that attitude leads to a race to the bottom. There's always someone who's willing to work for a little less, in a little shittier conditions, to pack a few more family members into a shitty apartment to make do.
If you leave it up to each worker to fend for himself with no negotiating power beyond his personal freedom to walk out, you get sweatshops and poorhouses in any industry where labor is fungible. If you want nice societies where average people can live in good homes with yards and nearby playgrounds and go to work at jobs that don't destroy their bodies and souls, then something has to keep wages at a level to support all that.
I'm not necessarily a fan of unions; I think in many cases you end up with the union screwing you from one side while the corporation screws you from the other. And the public sector unions we have today team up with the state to screw everyone else. But workers at least need the freedom to organize, or all the pressure on wages and conditions will be downward for any job that most people can do. The alternative is to have government try to keep wages and conditions up, and it's not good at that, so it just creates inflation with wages trailing behind.
Tech workers have the freedom to unionize in the US; with exceedingly rare exceptions, they’ve overwhelmingly not chosen to do so.
By ryandrake 2025-06-1816:35 Employees also face an enormous propaganda machine constantly telling them unions are bad, they just take your dues, you'll never do better negotiating together, and so on. The usual techie arrogance also plays a role: "Unions benefit common workers, but I am the one uniquely well-paid hard worker that is skilled at negotiaton who would not be advantaged by a union. Therefore unions are useless!" Every tech worker thinks that they alone are the captain of their industry and couldn't possibly benefit from coordinating with everyone else.
By triceratops 2025-06-1815:04 > Nobody wants to inhale toxic fumes in some factory? well then the company had better invest in safety equipment, or work dont get done. We dont need a union for this
We tried that in the past. The work still got done, and workers just died more often. If you want to live in that reality move to a developing country with poor labor protections.
By StefanBatory 2025-06-1814:19 > You can refuse to work with anyone writing vapid pro-LLM blog posts. You can blacklist them in hiring.
This works only if everyone is on with this. If they're not, you're shooting yourself in the foot while doing job hunting.
By meansob 2025-06-1818:37 [dead]
By paulcole 2025-06-1811:43 > The first thing any big technical revolution causes is suffering for a lot of people.
Didn’t Greg-from-marketing’s life just get a lot better at the same time?
By trod1234 2025-06-1815:55 > The first thing any big technical revolution causes is suffering for a lot of people.
This all assumes that such revolutions are built on resiliency and don't actually destroy the underpinning requirements of organized society. Its heavily skewed towards survivor bias.
Our greatest strength as a species is our ability to communicate knowledge, experience, and culture, and act as one large overarching organism when threats appear.
Take away communication, and the entire colony dies. No organization can occur, no signaling. There are two ways to take away communication, you prevent it from happening, or you saturate the channel to the Shannon Limit. The latter is enabled by AI.
Its like an ant hill or a bee hive where a chemical has been used to actively and continually destroy the pheromones the ants rely upon for signalling. What happens? The workers can't work, food can't be gathered, the hive dies. The organism is unable to react or adapt. Collapse syndrome.
Our society is not unlike the ant-hill or bee hive. We depend on a fine balance of factors doing productive work and in exchange for that work they get food, or more precisely money which they use to buy food. Economy runs because of the circulation of money from producer to factor to producer. When it sieves into fewer hands and stays there, distortions occur, these self-sustain and then eventually we are at the point where no production can occur because monetary properties are lost under fiat money printing. There is a narrow working range where outside the range on each side everything catastrophically fails. Hyper-inflation/Deflation
AI on the other hand eliminates capital formation of the individual. The time value of labor is driven to zero. There is a great need for competent workers for jobs, but no demand because no match can occur; communication is jammed. (ghost jobs/ghost candidates)
So you have failures on each end, which self-sustain towards socio-economic collapse. No money circulation going in means you can't borrow from the future through money printing. Debasement then becomes time limited and uncontrollable through debt traps, narrow working price range caused by consistent starvation of capital through wage suppression opens the door to food insecurity, which drives violence.
Resource extraction processes have destroyed the self-sustaining flows such that food in a collapse wouldn't even support half our current population, potentially even a quarter globally. 3 out of 4 people would die. (Malthus/Catton)
These things happen incredibly slowly and gradually, but there is a critical point we're about 5 years away from it if things remain unchanged, there is the potential that we have already passed this point too. Objective visibility has never been worse.
This point of no return where the dynamics are beyond any individual person, and after that point everyone involved in that system is dead but they just don't know it yet.
Mutually Assured Destruction would mean the environment becomes uninhabitable if chaos occurs and order is lost in such a breakdown.
We each have significant bias to not consider the unthinkable. A runaway positive feedback system eventually destroys itself, and like a dam that has broken with the waters rushing towards individuals; no individual can hold back those forces.
By RugnirViking 2025-06-1811:052 reply There are people trying very hard (and succeeding) to CREATE the impression it will pay less money. Pay in general is extremely vibes based. A look at well... anything in the economy shows that. There are constant shortages of low paying jobs, and gluts of high paying jobs
That's the opposite of what I'm seeing. I see plenty of openings at Walmart, bus drivers, etc. I see very few openings in many higher paying jobs (healthcare might be an exception). Even the dev jobs I'm finding are low paid at small companies, like $70k per year low (and this isn't a low cost area).
Wait a couple years before you start stating anything as a trend. There have been several downturns over my lifetime (I'm 50) where it was hard to find a tech job, and several periods of good times where tech people were in high demand. Until several years have past you cannot tell the difference between a temporary downturn and the end of an era.
Every time things turn bad a lot of people jump out and yell it is the end of the tech. They have so far been wrong. Only time will tell if they are right this time, though I personally doubt it.
I'm not saying it won't turn around, but its been about 2-3 years.
If it’s been 3 years, then I’m pretty sure it’s not AI-coding driven.
By al_borland 2025-06-1811:431 reply I suspect it only looks like there are a lot of high paying jobs, because they are so much harder to fill, due to a there being so few qualified candidates... hence the high pay. Supply and demand.
By bluGill 2025-06-1814:34 Supply and demand is also influenced by ability to become qualified. I'm not qualified to flip burgers, but any fast food place could get me qualified in just a few hours. I'm not qualified to be a doctor and it would take me years of training to get that qualification. I've met people who failed to qualify as a burger flipper - you can correctly guess by that statement they are very disabled, I've met many who failed to qualify as a doctor, and all are smart people since people who are not wouldn't even try.
By somenameforme 2025-06-1815:391 reply People aren't paid by value brought to companies, they're paid by the scarcity of their skill. Your analog is actually perfect for this. There's a reason saying you want to be a professional singer is generally something only a child would say. It's about as reliable a career as winning the lottery, simply because everybody can sing, lots of them quite decently. And so singer, as a career, mostly isn't a thing - it's a hobby with some distant hope of going Oliver Anthony at some point.
Software development has a huge barrier to entry which keeps the labor pool relatively small, which keeps wages relatively high. There's going to be a way larger pool of people capable of 'prompt engineering' which is going to send wages proportionally way down.
…unless the value created via prompt engineering is high enough to cause companies to rationally demand even more prompt engineers.
The size of the pie is nowhere near fixed, IMO. There are many things which would be valuable to program/automate, but are simply unaffordable to address with traditional software engineering at the current cost per unit of functionality.
If AI can create a significant increase in productivity, I can see a path to AI-powered programming being just as valuable as (and a lot less tedious than) today.
By somenameforme 2025-06-1818:141 reply Again it's not about value, but solely supply vs demand. If there was somehow only one person who could do janitorial work in a city, that'd be one rich janitor.
For a more realistic example - the software side at many companies essentially is the company. They bring products all the way from inception to launch. Yet they tend to get paid less, often much less, than the legal side. The reason is simply that the labor pool for lawyers is much smaller than for software engineers.
If there's not significant barriers to entry for prompt engineering, wages will naturally be low.
By sokoloff 2025-06-1819:15 Demand incorporates/expresses value (fairly obviously).
By OkayPhysicist 2025-06-1817:131 reply The best paying jobs are ones that look inapproachable and are inapproachable. (even if that's for two entirely different reasons). Most people look at surgeons, for example, and go "I could never do that", and their jobs are, in fact, difficult and require lots of training, and the combination of those two factors primes people to be willing to give them a bunch of money. Jobs that look hard but are (compared to appearances) easy also tend to pay pretty well.
But jobs that look easy or approachable are in a much tighter spot. Regardless of how difficult they actually are, people are far less willing to give them large amounts of money. Pretty much all the more artistic jobs fall into this camp. Just because any idiot can open up Photoshop and start scribbling, it doesn't follow that competent graphic design is easy.
Right now, software development is incidentally in the "looks hard is hard" category, because the reason it "looks hard" is entirely divorced from the reason it is hard. Most of the non-tech population is under the obviously (to us) incorrect impression that the hard part of programming is understanding code. We know that that's silly, and that any competent programmer can pick up a new programming language in a trivial amount of time, but you still see lots of job postings looking for "Java Developers" or "Python Developers" as opposed to actual domain specific stuff because non-technical folk look at a thing they know is complicated (software development) see the first thing that they don't understand (source code) and assume that all the complexity in the space is tied up in that one thing. This is the same instinct that drives people to buy visual programming systems and argue that jargon needs to be stripped out of research papers.
The shift over to plain-language prompt engineering won't solve the underlying difficulty of software development (requirement discovery, abstract problem solving), but it does pose the threat of making it look easy. Which will make people less prone to giving us massive stacks of money to write the magic runes that make the golems obey their commands.
By meansob 2025-06-1817:16 [dead]
By jplusequalt 2025-06-1814:14 >Why do we assume that Prompt Engineering is going to pay less money
It objectively takes less expertise and background knowledge to produce semi-working code. That lowers the barrier to entry, allowing more people to enter the market, which drives down salaries for everyone.
By bgwalter 2025-06-1812:25 Singing properly requires decades of training. Prompt engineering is like a 5 year old asking his parents for an ice cream. Some strategies are more successful than others.
By blindriver 2025-06-1816:111 reply Because the 10% difference between the best prompt engineer and a mediocre prompt engineer won't usually make a noticeable difference in output or productivity. There's no reason to specialize in it or pay extra because the gains are ephemeral.
By sokoloff 2025-06-1816:50 That’s a wild take to me.
I think that the spread of capability and effectiveness between the best and mediocre will continue to be several factors and might even increase as compared to today.
I can’t see any way it would be less than 2x.
If you need fewer prompt engineers than developers to do the same work, and if prompt engineering is easier than developing meaning all developers can do it, then you need up with a massive labor oversupply.
How many programmers did you need 40 years ago to write MS DOS programs? As you become more productive, more is expected of you. Instead of spending 10 days coloring pixels on the screen, now you're expected to push whole UIs in the same amount of time. Whether this is enabled by high-level languages, tools or AI is irrelevant.
I wonder if we need teams generating dozens of UIs or whatever every day though. There may (or may not) be a limit to how much value-adding work is available to do, or at least diminishing returns that no longer justify high salaries.
By bluGill 2025-06-1814:36 YEs we do - your point that there might be too many is valid, but a modern UI when done right is much more accessible to the "common man" than a MSDos and so all the time those teams put in is more than made up for in all the time you saving not having to teach all the people who will use the program and thus we need far more teams than in the MSDos days when we couldn't make a good UI in the first place.
By giantg2 2025-06-1816:13 What am I to be productive on? The bottleneck now is finding a business idea that's viable.
> Prompt engineering is like singing
i think you got the analogy wrong. Not everyone can sing professionally, but most people can type text into a text-to-speech synthesis system to produce a workable song.
By lubujackson 2025-06-1812:18 Maybe a better analogy is that now anyone can use autotune now and actually sing, but you still have to want to do it and put in the effort. Very few people do.
By roland35 2025-06-1812:18 Well there's value, but also supply and demand! If prompt engineering is easier that means more people will be able to do it!
By trod1234 2025-06-1815:40 > Why do we assume that Prompt Engineering is going to pay less money.
I supposed because every new job title that has come out in the last 20+ years has followed the same approach of initially the same or slightly more money, followed by significant reductions in workforce activities shortly thereafter, followed by coordinated mass layoffs and no work after that.
When 70% of the economy is taken over by a machine that can work without needing food, where can anyone go to find jobs to feed themselves let alone their children.
The underlying issues have been purposefully ignored by the people who are pushing these changes because these are problems for next quarter, and money printing through non-fraction reserve banking decouples the need to act.
Its all a problem for next quarter, which just gets kicked repeatedly until food security becomes a national security issue.
Politician's already don't listen to what people have to say, what makes you think they'll be able to do anything once organized violence starts happening because food is no longer available, because jobs are no longer available.
The idiots and political violence we see right now is nothing compared to what comes when people can't get food, when their mindset changes from we can work within the system to there is no out only through. When existential survival depends on removing the people responsible by any means, these things happen, and when the environment is ripe for it; they have friends everywhere.
UBI doesn't work because non-market socialism fails. You basically have a raging fire that will eventually reach every single person and burn them all alive, and it was started by evil blind idiots that wanted to replace human agency.
"I went to work early that day and noticed my monitor was on, and code was being written without anyone pressing any keys. Something had logged into my machine and was writting code. I ran to my boss and told him my computer had been hacked. He looked at me, concerned, and said I was hallucinating. ..."
it would have been funnier if the story then took a turn and ended with it was the AI complaining about a human writing code instead of it.
By pyman 2025-06-1815:49 Black mirror season 8? xD
By cjblomqvist 2025-06-1815:46 That goes both ways. As with math, it's sometimes not wise to look at the answer as soon as you stumble upon something you can't solve immediately - sometimes it's good to force the person learning to think deeper and try to understand the problem more thoroughly. It's also a skill of it's own to be able to cope with such situations and not just bail/give up/do something else.
I fear this will be more and more of a problem with the TikTok/instant gratification/attention is only good for less than 10 seconds -generation. Deep thinking has great value in many situations.
"Funnily" enough, I see management more and more reward this behavior. Speed is treated as vastly more important than driving in the right direction, long-term thinking. Quarterly reports, etc etc.
By giantg2 2025-06-1812:05 I don't feel this way at all. If anything, it's a morale drain. There's less cooperation since you're expected to ask AI. There's also limited career pathing since we want even fewer junior or mids, replacing them with AI.
By screye 2025-06-1815:28 It works both ways.
Yes, it's supportive and helps you stay locked in. But it also serves as a great frustration lightning rod. I enjoy being an unsavory person to the LLM when it behaves like a buffoon.
Sometimes you need a pressure release valve. Better an LLM than a person.
P.S: Skynet will not be kind to me.
I'm always amazed that people feel anything when chatting with an AI bot.
Don't people realize it's a machine "pretending" to be human?
By bondarchuk 2025-06-1815:141 reply People feel things reading books, watching movies, even animated ones that have no people in them, looking at abstract art... Why should this be any different?
By pier25 2025-06-1815:21 Do you take eg advertisement at face value? Even when you know they're trying to convince you to accept some idea of the brand and buy something?
Usually the feel part is the subconscius one that isn't swayed by knowing Like a phobia, its whole thing is being irrational, knowing it doesn't make sense doesn't diminish the feeling
By pier25 2025-06-1818:21 I don't know if it's usual. I doubt it is.
When you watch a video ad do you feel an irrational need to buy a product?
By reactordev 2025-06-1815:08 I have had to correct AI enough to know it’s the equivalent of a cocky junior dev that read a paper once.
I’ll stick to human emotional support.
By blindriver 2025-06-1816:08 I 100% agree with this. Part of the problem is getting stuck with bad documentation or a bad API, and asking ChatGPT to generate sample code is really beneficial to keeping me going instead of mothballing an idea for months or forever.
By anonzzzies 2025-06-1810:50 It is exactly how I use it personally the most: it will crap down a massive amount of plumbing that I really do not feel like doing myself at all. So when I think of procrastinating, I tell it to write something: after 30 minutes I will have something that would be procrastinate me from hours to never doing it at all. Now its 'almost done anyway, so might as well finish it'. Then I spend 3 months hacking on it while, at any point, getting the AI do the annoying stuff I know im not going to do or postpone. If only for that... I find bug fixing more rewarding and easier than writing crap from scratch anyway.
By khurs 2025-06-1815:26 Isn’t that the same as posting on stack overflow, Reddit or other forums saying you are stuck and getting an answer.
With LLM it’s speed - seconds rather than the minutes or hours as per stack overflow which is main benefit.
By tombert 2025-06-1816:24 I completely agree.
There have been several personal projects that have been on the back-burner for a few years now that I would implement about 20% of, get stuck and frustrated, and give up on because I'm not being paid for it anyway.
With ChatGPT, being able to bounce back and forth with it is enough to unblock me a lot of the time, and I have gotten all my projects over the finish line. Am I learning as much as I would if I had powered through it without AI? Probably not, but I'm almost certainly learning more than I would had I given up on the project like I usually do.
To me, I view ChatGPT as an "intelligent rubber duck". It's not perfect, in fact a lot of the time time the suggestions are flatout wrong, but just being able to communicate with something that gives some input seems to really help me progress.
By xeromal 2025-06-1812:11 I hate to admit this but I was struggling with a dbt at work and I had copilot scan what I Was doing and it found a type that was almost impossible for me to notice. lol. It really can be useful.
By hippari2 2025-06-1815:15 I find that with enough wrong answers it feels like you are fighting alone again haha.
By Kiro 2025-06-1812:44 Yes, I've been saying that AI helps with procrastination a lot.
By croes 2025-06-1813:52 Could work in the other direction. When you are stuck and get the solution from the AI you lose the feeling of achievement because it’s done by somewhat/someone else
"Great news, boss! We invented this new tool that allows nontechnical people to write code in English! Now anyone can deploy applications, and we don't have to hire all those expensive developers!"
"Wow, show it to me!"
"OK here it is. We call it COBOL."
FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) was another "AI" project in "automatic programming":
"Before 1954, almost all programming was done in machine language or assembly language. Programmers rightly regarded their work as a complex, creative art that required human inventiveness to produce an efficient program."
-John Backus, "The History of Fortran I, II, and III", https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/800025.1198345
"The IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System or briefly, FORTRAN, will comprise a large set of programs to enable the IBM 704 to accept a concise formulation of a problem in terms of a mathematical notation and to produce automatically a high speed 704 program for the solution of the problem."
-IBM, "Specifications for the IBM Mathematical FORmula TRANslating System, FORTRAN", http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Fortran/10...
Fortran promised to eliminate debugging. In 2015, I taught React is a functional programming way to create very fast, bug free apps and the project manager found ways to push us to the hair-on-fire status quo.
"FORTRAN should virtually eliminate coding and debugging" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3970011
By Gravityloss 2025-06-187:191 reply SQL had similar promises.
But it still has been immensely useful and a durable paradigm, even though usage hasn't been exactly as thought.
For some strange reason Excel really managed to do it. Many many people who don't think of themselves anywhere near being a programmer, somehow get at ease in front of Excel enough that they often inadvertently and kind of unawarely end up learning programming concepts and creating much more complex computational applications than its been possible with any other tool for non-developers.
I have a theory on that, based on something I do that over the years I've learned a lot of my co-workers don't do: When I'm reading code, I have the contents of the variables all in mind and am manipulating them as I read the code. When describing it a couple of times they've said "oh, like a human compiler"... So I really don't know what's going on in their heads, but this seems like the reason I can understand code I haven't seen before faster than most of them.
Spreadsheets flip the usual interface from code-first to data-first, so the program is directly presenting the user with a version of what I'm doing in my head. It allows them to go step-by-step building up the code while focusing on what they want to do (transform data) instead of having to do it in their head while focusing on the how (the code).
By bonoboTP 2025-06-1814:53 Yes, laying everything out in a 2D grid is just quite intuitive, like arranging objects on a tabletop. Also, it's flat, there's little nesting and you don't have to come up with abstraction hierarchies and loops are typically just unrolled in place.
By Izkata 2025-06-1812:30 "Now hold still, I'm about to perform a miracle."
You're joking but it's true. I'm sure you know that. SQL had similar claims... Declarative, say what you need and the computer will do for you. Also written in English.
By charlieyu1 2025-06-1810:16 Don’t think the person was joking. It was literally the promise of COBOL
And compared to what we had before SQL, it is much easier to use, and a lot more people are able to use it.
By noworriesnate 2025-06-1717:467 reply But software developers often struggle to use sql and prefer using ORMs or analytical APIs like polars; the people who excel at sql are typically not programmers, they’re data engineers, DBAs, analysts, etc.
Maybe a similar bifurcation will arise where there are vibe coders who use LLMs to write everything, and there are real engineers who avoid LLMs.
Maybe we’re seeing the beginning of that with the whole bifurcation of programmers into two camps: heavy AI users and AI skeptics.
What you can achieve with the standard SQL is taught on universities. The whole package. I’ve never met a developer, who struggled with that. When you use ORMs you need to follow SQL’s logic anyway. People use ORMs to avoid painful data conversions. Not to avoid the logic. Data engineers, DBAs, analysts, etc excel in specific databases, not in “SQL”.
By FranzFerdiNaN 2025-06-186:171 reply Ive worked in BI and data engineering my whole career and I’ve met plenty of programmers who struggled immensely with SQL once it went further than select and group by. And don’t get me started about their database design skills. It’s way too often a disaster hidden behind “it works for the software so good enough”.
Im more surprised by software engineers who do know these things than by the ones who don’t.
By maccard 2025-06-187:20 I’ve worked with gameplay programmers who can’t do simple 3D math, c++ programmers who fundamentally don’t understand pointers, backend developers who didn’t understand globals were shared state and cause race conditions, etc.
It’s not that SQL is hard, it’s that for any discipline the vast majority of people don’t have a solid grasp of the tools they’re using. Ask most tradespeople about the underlying thing they’re working with and you’ll have the same problem.
By adalacelove 2025-06-184:101 reply I'm a developer and: - I hate ORMs, they are the source for a lot of obscure errors behind layers and layers of abstractions. - I prefer analytical APIs for technical reasons, not just the language.
Reasons: - I can compose queries, which in turn makes them easier to decompose - It's easier to spot errors - I avoid parsing SQL strings - It's easier to interact with the rest of the code, both functions and objects
If I need to make just a query I gladly write SQL
Well, the problem in ORM is the O. Objection-orientation is just a worse way to organise your data and logic than relational algebra.
It's just a shame that many languages don't support relational algebra well.
We had relations as a datatype and all the relevant operations over them (like join) in a project I was working on. It was great! Very useful for expressing business logic.
By tpm 2025-06-187:33 The problem in ORM is the M, the mapping is always lossy and a leaky abstraction.
By atomicnumber3 2025-06-1815:31 Aren't data engineers programmers? That is to say, a data engineer is-a software engineer?
I share your sentiment though - I'm a data engineer (8 years) turned product engineer (3 years) and it astounds me how little SQL "normal" programmers know. It honestly changed my opinion on ORMs - it's not like the SQL people would write exceeds the basic select/filter/count patterns that is the most that non-data people know.
By idiotsecant 2025-06-183:531 reply 'real' engineers can use SQL just fine. This is a strange position to take.
By collingreen 2025-06-1811:041 reply No true Scotsman would struggle with sql
By idiotsecant 2025-06-1819:08 Are you saying that expecting software developers to know how to use SQL is a no true scotsman fallacy? What's next? Do we stop expecting people to know how FOR loops work?
> But software developers often struggle to use sql
Is this true? It doesn't seem true to me.
By winnie_ua 2025-06-1812:32 Oh, sweet summer child.
Yes, there are so many so called developers in backend field of work who do not know how to do basic SQL. Anything bigger than s9imple WHERE clause.
I wouldn't even talk about using indexes in database.
By downrightmike 2025-06-1816:22 They're all real programmers John
Claude made this point while reviewing my blog for me: the mechanization of farms created a whole lot more specialization of roles. The person editing CAD diagrams of next year's combine harvester may not be a farmer strictly speaking, but farming is still where their livelihood comes from.
By dredmorbius 2025-06-1718:271 reply Strictly speaking, farming is where all our livelihoods come from, in the greatest part. We're all living off the surplus value of food production.
(Also of other food, energy, and materials sourcing: fishing, forestry, mining, etc.)
This was the insight of the French economist François Quesnay in his Tableau économique, foundation of the Physiocratic school of economics.
You might find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarine#Coal_butter fascinating.
> Strictly speaking, farming is where all our livelihoods come from, in the greatest part. We're all living off the surplus value of food production.
I don't think farming is special here, because food isn't special. You could make exactly the same argument for water (or even air) instead of food, and all of a sudden all our livelihoods would derive ultimately from the local municipal waterworks.
Whether that's a reductio ad absurdum of the original argument, or a valuable new perspective on the local waterworks is left as an exercise to the reader.
By bluGill 2025-06-1814:43 Except in a few places drinkable water is in such abundance that nobody every spent significant effort trying to get it. Likewise for air, few people have ever spent much effort getting air to breathe - even in the worst polluted areas bottled air was reserved for airplanes, hospitals (and a few people with medical conditions), and scuba divers.
By swader999 2025-06-1812:10 Land is scarce though. The amount of software work that needs doing might not be, it could be infinite or probably more tied to electrical capacity.
Removing jobs that could only be performed by those living near the particular fields with those that can be done anywhere makes jobs for the person willing to take the least satisfactory compensation for the most skill and work.
Working the summer fields was one of the least desirable jobs but still gave local students with no particular skills a good supplemental income appropriate for whichever region.
By miki123211 2025-06-189:52 depending on the job, it may also allow you to select for talent much better, which creates intense competition and raises salaries significantly.
A good example of this phenomenon is sports. Even thought it can't be done remotely, it's so talent dependent that it's often better to find a great player in a foreign country and ask them to work for you, rather than relying exclusively on local talent. If it could be a remote job, this effect would be even greater.
Yes, but automating these away means that food becomes cheaper.
We increase the overall total prosperity with that automation.
By lipowitz 2025-06-188:48 Increasing total prosperity is the wrong goal if distribution is completely unregulated. Investor and real estate owning classes like the 1% get more, the salaries can trend down because food costs are down, in a deflation spiral the youth are perpetual dependents and/or debtors who can't possibly earn enough over day to day costs given global competition includes people with no debts or debts from an economy that was less wealthy.
By ameliaquining 2025-06-1717:422 reply Is that really because of the English-esque syntax, rather than because it was a step forward in semantic expressivity? If SQL looked like, say, C#'s LINQ method syntax, would it really be harder to use?
> Is that really because of the English-esque syntax
Well, what we had before SQL[1] was QUEL, which is effectively the same as Alpha[2], except in "English". Given the previous assertion about what came before SQL, clearly not. I expect SQL garnered favour because it is tablational instead of relational, which is the quality that makes it easier to understand for those not heavy in the math.
[1] Originally known as SEQUEL, a fun word play on it claiming to be the QUEL successor.
[2] The godfather language created by Codd himself.
Do you have any advice for understanding the difference between "relational" and "tablational"? I remember hearing something about how SQL is not really relational from my college professor, but we never really explored that statement.
By 9rx 2025-06-1815:32 Quite simply: A relation is a set of tuples, while a table is a list/multiset of tuples.
The Alpha/QUEL linage chose relations, while SQL went with tables. Notably, a set has no ordering or duplicates — which I suggest is in contrast to how the layman tends to think about the world, and thus finds it to be an impediment when choosing between technology options. There are strong benefits to choosing relations over tables, as Codd wrote about at length, but they tend to not show up until you get into a bit more complexity. By the time your work reaches that point, the choice of technology is apt to already be made.
With care, SQL enables mimicking relations to a reasonable degree when needed, which arguably offers the best of all worlds. That said, virtually all of the SQL bugs I see in the real world come as a result of someone not putting in enough care in that area. When complexity grows, it becomes easy to overlook the fine details. Relational algebra and calculus would help by enforcing it. But, tradeoffs, as always.
By razakel 2025-06-1815:16 Per the SQL specification:
>SQL [...] is a database language [...] used for access to pseudo-relational databases that are managed by pseudo-relational database management systems (RDBMS).
>SQL is based on, but is not a strict implementation of, the relational model of data, making SQL “pseudo-relational” instead of truly relational.
>The relational model requires that every relation have no duplicate rows. SQL does not enforce this requirement.
>The relational model does not specify or recognize any sort of flag or other marker that represents unspecified, unknown, or otherwise missing data values. Consequently, the relational model depends only on two-valued (true/false) logic. SQL provides a “null value” that serves this purpose. In support of null values, SQL also depends on three-valued (true/false/unknown) logic.
Or, in other words, "relation" does not mean the relations between the tables as many assume: the tables, as a set of tuples, are the relations.
By AdieuToLogic 2025-06-181:52 Before SQL became an industry standard, many programs which required a persistent store used things like ISAM[0], VISAM (a variant of ISAM[0]), or proprietary B-Tree libraries.
None of these had "semantic expressivity" as their strength.
> If SQL looked like, say, C#'s LINQ method syntax, would it really be harder to use?
Yes.
By kayodelycaon 2025-06-1723:41 SQL and many DSLs (JIRA…) are actually used by plenty of non-technical users. Anyone who wants to build their own reports and do basic data analysis has sufficient incentive to learn it.
They are very much the exception that proves the rule though.
By rixed 2025-06-186:50 Or QBE, "Query By Exemple", that was another try by IBM to make a query language directly usable by anyone.
Er, have you heard of datalog or Prolog? Declarative programming really does work. SQL was just... Botched.
By sanderjd 2025-06-184:49 I think SQL is better than datalog. I suspect this is one of those opinions that may be somewhat outside consensus on a forum like HN, but is strongly within the consensus more broadly.
By glimshe 2025-06-1721:24 Yes. And I think SQL is actually pretty good for what it does. My point, as the parent's (I suppose) is that we've heard this "XYZ, which uses natural language, will kill software development" before.
By dredmorbius 2025-06-1718:234 reply I'd long ago (1990s-era) heard that the original intent was that office secretaries would write their own SQL queries.
(I'd love for someone to substantiate or debunk this for me.)
That's always the promise of these things; non-specialists will be able to program now! This has been going on since COBOL. The one case where it arguably worked out to some extent was spreadsheets.
By bluGill 2025-06-1814:47 Anyone with complex spreadsheets (which is a lot of companies) has a few programmers with the job of maintaining them. The more training those people have in "proper programming" the better the spreadsheets work.
By ahmeneeroe-v2 2025-06-1817:41 It kinda came true. "Office secretaries" became PMs/junior analysts/etc and those people generally know basic SQL nowadays
By jimbokun 2025-06-1814:45 I would say that failed with SQL but succeeded with Excel. If you replace "office secretaries" with "office workers" in general.
By AdieuToLogic 2025-06-181:302 reply > Early on, programming was considered secretarial work.
Incorrect.
Encoding a program was considered secretarial work, not the act of programming itself. Over time, "encoding" was shortened to "coding."
This is why the industry term "coder" is a pejorative descriptor.
By eru 2025-06-186:23 > This is why the industry term "coder" is a pejorative descriptor.
For some people some of the time. I don't think that's true in general.
> This is why the industry term "coder" is a pejorative descriptor.
It is not.
By brabel 2025-06-1811:20 It used to be widely seen as such. See for example Stallmanns latest post where he mentions that. Coder was not the same as programmer, it was the lesser half of the job. Nowadays the term has lost its original meaning.
Bravo. This is the exact sentiment I have, but you expressed in a way that I could never have.
Most people miss the fact that technical improvements increases the pie in a way that was not possible before.
When digital cameras became popular, everybody become a photographer. That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers. Same with YouTube & creativity.
And same with coding & LLMs. World will have lots more of apps, and programmers.
By munificent 2025-06-1718:495 reply > That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers.
I disagree with the "only" part here. Imagine a distribution curve of photos with shitty photos on the left and masterpieces on the right and the height at the curve is how many photos there are to be seen at that quality.
The digital camera transition massively increased the height of the curve at all points. And thanks to things like better autofocus, better low light performance, and a radically faster iteration loop, it probably shift the low and middle ends to the right.
It even certainly increased the number number of breathtaking, life-changing photos out there. Digital cameras are game-changes for photographic journalists traveling in difficult locations.
However... the curve is so high now, the sheer volume of tolerably good photos so overwhelming, that I suspect that average person actually sees fewer great photos than they did twenty years ago. We all spend hours scrolling past nice-but-forgottable sunset shots on Instagram and miss out on the amazing stuff.
We are drowning in a sea of "pretty good". It is possible for there to be too much media. Ultimately, we all have a finite amount of attention to spend before we die.
By DavidPiper 2025-06-1723:331 reply Thank you for describing this so eloquently.
Meaning no disrespect to photographers, I'm starting to think that a probable outcome of all the AI investment is a sharp uptick in shovelware.
If we can get AIs to build "pretty good" things - or even just "pretty average" things - cheaply, then our app stores, news feeds, ad feeds, company directives, etc, will be continuously swamped with it.
By eru 2025-06-186:24 > Meaning no disrespect to photographers, I'm starting to think that a probable outcome of all the AI investment is a sharp uptick in shovelware.
You can use AI to filter out the shovelware, so you never have to see it.
You hit this so hard it was impossible not to recognize. In every sense there is too much "ok" shit (in every media realm) that we cannot help but miss amazing stuff. Knowing that I don't have enough time for all the incredible things that technology has enabled crushes me.
By jimbokun 2025-06-1814:52 All of the old, great classic movies are available for streaming somewhere.
I still find great value in the TCM cable channel. Simply because if I tune in at a random time, it's likely to be showing an excellent old film I either never heard of or never got around to watching.
The service they are offering is curation, which has a lot of value in an age of infinite content flooding our attention constantly.
By munificent 2025-06-1814:59 ...and now think how much worse this problem will become now that we're in the era of generative AI.
Experts warn that at current production levels, the supply of dick pics may actually outpace demand in a couple decades.
By DavidPiper 2025-06-182:511 reply I was under the impression that supply already vastly outstrips demand.
By eru 2025-06-186:24 Demand is very unevenly distributed. I think they are appreciated on Grindr.
It affects even the competent photographer. How many times do you see that photographer with all the gear sit in front of a literal statue and fire off a 30 shot burst in 2 seconds? I don’t envy these pro photo editors either today in sports. I wonder how many shots they have to go through per touchdown from all the photographers at the end zone firing a burst until everyone stands up and throws the ball back at the ref? After a certain point you probably have to just close your eyes and pick one of the shots that looks almost identical to another 400. Not a job for analysis paralysis people. I guess it sure beats having to wait for the slide film to develop.
By dotancohen 2025-06-188:161 reply The AI is already picking out the best photo in those 400-shot bursts.
And sometimes it is even combining elements from different photos: Alice had her eyes closed in this otherwise great shot, but in this other shot her eyes were open. A little touch-up and we've got the perfect photo.
By kjkjadksj 2025-06-1818:32 What AI does this right now?
By bluGill 2025-06-1814:53 I suspect most of the time you can eliminate 300 of those 400 right away - they obviously are either too early or too late to capture the moment. On the remaining 100 you can choose any one (or more likely 5 as there are likely several moments - the moment the catch is made and the moment the athlete smiles as he realizes he made that catch).
The reason to take all 400 though as every once in a while one photo is obviously better than another for some reason. You also want several angles because sometimes the light will be wrong at the moment, or someone will happen to be in the way of your shot...
By socalgal2 2025-06-185:30 don't you just let the AI pick? I'm only half joking. I thought that was a feature added to smartphones a year or two ago?
By dijksterhuis 2025-06-1718:472 reply > That only made the world better
Did it?
people now stand around on dance floors taking photos and videos of themselves instead of getting on dancing and enjoying the music. to the point where clubs put stickers on phones to stop people from doing it.
people taking their phone out and videoing / photographing something awful happening, instead of doing something helpful.
people travel to remote areas where the population has been separated from humanity and do stupid things like leave a can of coke there, for view count.
it’s not made things better, it just made things different. whether that’s better or worse depends on your individual perspective for a given example.
so, i disagree. it hasn’t only made things better. it made some things easier. some things better. some things worse. some things harder.
someone always loses, something is always lost. would be good if more people in tech remembered that progress comes at a cost.
By skeeter2020 2025-06-183:28 Live music sucks when you're trying to watch the show and some dumb-dumb is holding their phone above their head to shoot the entire show with low-light, bad angle & terrible sound. NO ONE is going to watch that, and you wrecked the experience for many people. Put your phone away and live in the present, please...
> people now stand around on dance floors taking photos and videos of themselves instead of getting on dancing and enjoying the music. to the point where clubs put stickers on phones to stop people from doing it.
There are other types of dances where dancers are far more interested in the dance than selfies: Lindy Hop, Blues, Balboa, Tango, Waltz, Jive, Zouk, Contra, and West Coast Swing to name a few. Here are videos from the Blues dance I help organize where none of the dancers are filming themselves:
* https://www.facebook.com/61558260095218/videos/7409340551418...
By skeeter2020 2025-06-183:30 Thank you for sharing your social media videos as evidence in a rebuttal to "camera phones are not all good; they're ubiquitous use has negative implication too". So delicious...
By VonTum 2025-06-1723:57 The irony!
Though, I'll grant that there's not really a way to argue this without showing videos
That sort of dancing is basically a sport. You have to learn it, you have to get good at it after you learned it, and it is cardio after all. I think op was talking more about what you see in the edm scene these days. Where basically people aren’t there to dance like the old days or sing along like other genres, they are there to see a certain DJ and then they will post clips from the entire set on their instagram story. And they can do this because the dancing they are doing at the edm show is super passive kind of dancing where you are just swaying a little so you can hold the phone stably at the same time. If you were dancing like how they’d dance at the edm concerts in the 90s all rolling on molly it would be like your blues swing where its just too physical to do anything but rave around flinging your arms all around shirtless and sweaty.
By ttoinou 2025-06-185:46 Look into contact impro and ecstatic dance : cellphones are forbidden and you can dance however you like it
By flashgordon 2025-06-1719:481 reply I would add one thing though. The pie definitely gets bigger - but i feel there is a period of "downsizing" that happens. I think this is becuase of lack of ideas. When you have tool that (say) 10xes your productivity, its not that bosses will have ideas to build 10x the number of things - they will just look to cut costs first (hello lack of imagination and high interest rates).
By sarchertech 2025-06-180:361 reply We’ve had many improvements that increased productivity at least as much as current LLMs, and I don’t think any of them ever temporarily caused downsizing in the total number of programmers.
By flashgordon 2025-06-1818:29 Is it possible that we dont remember them precisely because they are temporary (atleast in the grand scheme of things)?
I thought photographers don't get paid well anymore due market saturation and few skills required to get a good photo?
This implies photographers used to be paid well in the past, which isn't true. Like painting or rock music, photography has always been a winner-takes-all kind of market where a select few can get quite wealthy but the vast majority will be struggling forever.
By bluGill 2025-06-1815:04 While photographer was never a sure path to rich and famous, professionals used to do very good business and make a good living.
Demand is way down because while a $5000 lens on a nice camera is better than my phone lens, my phone is close enough for most purposes. Also my phone is free, in the days of film a single roll of film by the time you developed it costs significant money (I remember as a kid getting a camera for my birthday and then my parents wouldn't get me film for it - on hindsight I suspect every roll of film cost my dad half an hour of work and he was a well paid software developer). This cost meant that you couldn't afford to practice taking pictures, every single one had to be perfect. So if you wanted a nice picture of the family it was best to pay a professional who because of experience and equipment was likely to take a much better one than you could (and if something went wrong they would retake for free).
It is still as hard as its been to get a good photo. They had full auto film cameras that could take good photos in the 70s but the devil is always the edge cases and the subconscious ability to take an evenly exposed (in the Ansel Adams definition not auto camera exposure definition), well composed image at the decisive moment. Understanding how lighting works (either natural, or different artificial light like flash or studio lighting) is also not easy.
It is pretty hard to break out but people still make names for themselves either from experience on assignments like the old days but also from instagram and other social media followings. People still need weddings shot and professional portraits taken which takes some skill in understanding the logistics of how to actually do that job well efficiently and managing your equipment.
By bluGill 2025-06-1815:09 As I said in a sibling reply: practice is much easier and so it is much easier to get good. Film was expensive and so few could afford to become good photographers. Sure everyone had a camera, many of them nice SLRs with decent lens (but probably not auto focus - for both better and worse), but it wouldn't take a lot of photos to exceed that cost in film.
By bluefirebrand 2025-06-1722:183 reply > World will have lots more of apps, and programmers.
This is actually bad for existing programmers though?
Do you not see how this devalues your skills?
By platevoltage 2025-06-1722:44 I see your point, but I'm having personally having a different experience.
A client of mine has gotten quite good at using Bolt and Lovable. He has since put me on 3 more projects that he dreamed up and vibe coded that would just be a figment of his imagination pre-AI.
He knows what's involved in software development, and knows that he can't take it all the way with these tools.
By sarchertech 2025-06-180:383 reply There are far more programmers now than in 1980, yet the average programmer makes far more (inflation adjusted) now.
By Funes- 2025-06-1815:49 Absolutely not, not to the same extent. That's a really illogical statement on your part, considering that the technical barrier to entry to even begin to think about developing a program in 1980 was much, much higher than what it's been for more than a decade now.
By kjkjadksj 2025-06-182:35 Thank the Bangalore office for that.
By FirmwareBurner 2025-06-185:471 reply How much online shopping could you do from your PC in 1980? How many people had smartphones in 1980?
That's why sw devs salaries went up like crazy in our time and not in 1980.
But what new tech will we have, that will push the SW dev market demand up like internet connected PCs and smartphones did? All I see is stagnation in the near future, just maintaining or rewriting the existing shit that we have, not expanding into new markets.
By WJW 2025-06-1810:18 Maintaining and rewriting existing shit is quite well paying though, and also something that AI seems to struggle with. (Funnily enough, AI seems to struggles even more with refactoring vibecoded projects than with refactoring human-written apps. What that says about the quality of the vibe coded code I don't know.)
In the current state, yes. But that is also an opportunity, isn't it?
When online flight bookings came about, travel agents were displaced. The solution isn't "let's stop online flight bookings sites and protect travel agents" because that's an inefficient system
By dijksterhuis 2025-06-180:373 reply Why does every system need to be efficient?
By hackernoops 2025-06-181:44 Fractional reserve lending, rehypothecation, etc.
Under capitalism, because greater margins. Under not-capitalism, so as to free up resources and labor for other things or just increase available downtime for people.
By Funes- 2025-06-1813:53 >Under capitalism, because greater margins
Under capitalism, or late-stage capitalism, if you will, more efficient procedures aren't normally allowing for greater margins. There are countless examples of more exploitative and wasteful strategies yielding much greater margins than more efficient alternatives.
Sorry to be that guy, but would to prefer if your computer and phone each cost $5000?
By tonyedgecombe 2025-06-185:16 In some ways I would, computing lost something once normal people were allowed in.
By dijksterhuis 2025-06-1813:391 reply > The solution isn't "let's stop online flight bookings sites and protect travel agents" because that's an inefficient system
this is akin to the self-checkout aisles in supermarkets, some of which have been rolled back to add back in more human checkout staff.
why? people liked interacting with the inefficient humans. turns out efficiency isn’t ideal in all cases.
i wasn’t trying to argue that everything should be inefficient. i was trying to point out that not everything needs to be efficient.
two very different things, and it seems (?) you may have thought i meant the former.
By amanaplanacanal 2025-06-1815:41 I know someone who will never use self-check, because he isn't getting paid to scan his own groceries.
I, on the other hand, will use whichever gets me out of the store faster. I don't view shopping for groceries as a social occasion.
I guess it takes all types.
And now the business of wedding / portrait photographer has become hyper-competitive. Now everyone's cousin is an amateur photographer and every phone has an almost acceptable camera built in. It is much more difficult to have a profitable photography business compared to 20 years ago.
The game has definitely changed. It used to be profitable to be a photographer for hire, and that’s no longer the case. But the revenue generated through pictures (by influencers) has increased a lot.
If today all you do as a programmer is open jira tickets without any kind of other human interaction, AI coding agents are bad news. If you’re just using code as a means to build products for people, it might be the best thing that has happened in a long time.
By jimbokun 2025-06-1814:58 > But the revenue generated through pictures (by influencers) has increased a lot.
So the job qualifications went from "understand lighting, composition, camera technology" to "be hot".
That's good to hear. Back when I got married there were some real jerks in the wedding photography business, and they weren't worried about running out of customers. Here's an actual conversation I had with one of them:
Me: "I'm getting married on [date] and I'm looking for a photographer."
Them, in the voice of Nick Burns: "We're already filling up for next year. Good luck finding a photographer this year."
Me: "I just got engaged. You never have anything open up?"
Them: "No" and hang up the phone.
The faster guys like that struggle to make a living, the better.
By tonyedgecombe 2025-06-185:20 I know a couple of professional photographers and neither of them will do weddings. It seems many of the clients are as bad as the photographers.
By LargeWu 2025-06-1720:30 In the same breath, those photographers will complain about all the "amateurs" devaluing their services.
By NewsaHackO 2025-06-1718:05 Definitely. What matters more is that the ability to take photos is available to more people, which is a net positive.
By insane_dreamer 2025-06-182:341 reply > everybody become a photographer. That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers.
Not sure I agree. I haven't seen much evidence of "better photography" now that it's digital instead of film. There are a million more photos taken, yes, because the cost is zero. But quantity != quality or "better", and if you're an average person, 90% those photos are in some cloud storage and rarely looked at again.
You could argue that drones have made photography better because it's enabled shots that were impossible or extremely difficult before (like certain wildlife/nature shots).
One thing digital photography did do is decimate the photographer profession because there is so much abundance of "good enough" photos - why pay someone to take good ones? (This may be a lesson for software development too.)
By bluGill 2025-06-1815:12 While the vast majority of photos are bad, there are still more great photos mixed in than ever before. You of course won't see them because even great photos are hid from view in all the noise, but they are still there.
By deanCommie 2025-06-186:141 reply > That only made the world better, and we got soo many more good photographers. Same with YouTube & creativity.
I think you really missed the point of what these technologies and innovations actually did for society and how it applies to today, underneath the snark.
In the 1970's, if you got gifted a camera, and were willing to put in the work to figure out how to use it, you learned a skill that immediately put you in rare company.
With enough practice of that skill you could be a professional photographer, which would be a good , reliable, well paid job. Now, the barrier of entry is nothing, so it's extremely competitive to be a professional photographer, and even the ones that succeed just scrape by. And you have to stand out on other things than the technical ability to operate a camera.
That's...what's about to happen (if it hasn't already) with software developers.
By bluGill 2025-06-1815:26 > In the 1970's, if you got gifted a camera, and were willing to put in the work to figure out how to use it, you learned a skill that immediately put you in rare company.
Everyone in the 1970s was gifted a camera. Many of them got a nice SLR with better lens than a modern smart phone. Cameras were expensive, but within reach of most people.
Film was a different story. Today you can get 35mm film rolls for about $8 (36 pictures), and $13 to develop (plus shipping!), and $10 for prints (in 1970 you needed prints for most purposes, thought slides were an option), so $31 - where I live McDonalds starts you are $16/hour, that roll of film costs almost 2 hours work - before taxes.
Which is to say you couldn't afford to become skilled in 1970 unless you were rich.
By iamflimflam1 2025-06-186:391 reply I think what we forget is these high level languages did open up programming to people who would have been considered “nontechnical” back in the day.
By ath92 2025-06-188:30 This is true, but: - there are more programmers today than there were back then - the best programmers are still those who would be considered technical back then
By platevoltage 2025-06-1722:41 Fast forward a couple decades and "Ok here it is. We call it Dreamweaver"
By veqq 2025-06-1718:20 By ashoeafoot 2025-06-186:222 reply We now have assembler, now anyone can program.
No, wait it was called natural language coding, now anyone can code.
No, wait it was called run anything self fixing code. No wait, simplified domain specific language.
No, wait it was uml based coding.
No, wait excel makros.
No, wait its node based drag and drop .
No, wait its LLMs.
The mental retardation of no code is strong with the deciding caste, every reincarnation must be taxed.
By chii 2025-06-186:35 The big difference with LLM is that you don't have to have a conherant and logical thought, and the LLM will "fix" that for you by morphing it into the nearest coherent expression and show you the result.
Presumably, the LLM user will have sufficient brain capacity to verify that the result works as they have imagined (however incomplete the mental picture might be). They then have an opportunity to tweak, in real time (of sorts), to make the output closer to what they want. Repeat this as many times as needed/time available, and the output gets to be quite sufficient for purpose.
This is how traditional, bespoke software development would've worked with contractor developers. Except with LLM, the turnaround time is in minutes, rather than in days or weeks.
By soulofmischief 2025-06-186:271 reply What's wrong with visual programming?
By ashoeafoot 2025-06-1814:04 Information density is low, some concepts are hard to display and thus absent by design from the language, the limitations of the display abd debug framework become the limitation of all code executed with them..etc., etc. list goes on forever
By tempodox 2025-06-1815:37 But a sycophant with a hopeless case of Dunning-Kruger (a.k.a. LLM) is so much more entertaining!
By mrheosuper 2025-06-183:27 pretty sure i use English in C program.
By RickJWagner 2025-06-1812:35 Very true.
But consider this— back in the day, how many mainframe devs ( plus all important systems programmer! ) would it take to conjure up a CRUD application?
Did you forget the vsam SME or dba? The CICS programming?
Today, one person can do that in a jiffy. Much, much less manpower.
That might be what AI does.
By fuzztester 2025-06-1723:561 reply that was from 35 to 40 years ago.
today:
s/COBOL/SQL
and the statement is still true, except that many devs nowadays are JS-only, and are too scared or lazy as shit to learn another, relatively simple language like SQL. ("it's too much work". wtf do you think a job is. it's another name for work.)
because, you know, "we have to ship yesterday" (which funnily enough, is always true, like "tomorrow never comes").
By 8note 2025-06-183:42 SQL is straightforward enough, but its not the sketchy part. taking down the database so other people cant use it by running a test query is the bad part.
the explains are not nearly as straightforward to read, and the process of writing SQL is to write the explain yourself, and then try to coax the database into turning SQL you write into that explain. its a much less pleasent LLM chat experience
By michaelteter 2025-06-1723:572 reply Having experienced several overhyped corporate knee-jerk (and further press-amplified) silver bullets, I expect this will play out about as well as the previous ones.
And by that, I mean corps will make poor decisions that will be negative for thought workers while never really threatening executive compensation.
I see this latest one somewhat like TFA author: this is a HUGE opportunity for intelligent, motivated builders. If our jobs are at risk now or have already been lost, then we might as well take this time to make some of the things we have thought about making before but were too busy to do (or too fatigued).
In the process, we may not only develop nice incomes that are independent of PHB decisions, but some will even build things that these same companies will later want to buy for $$$.
By dotancohen 2025-06-188:33 I've already started.
I've been recording to myself voice notes for years. Until now they've seemingly been near-read-only. The friction for recording them is often low (in settings where I can speak freely) but getting the information out of them has been difficult.
I'm now writing software to help me quickly get information out of the voice notes. So they'll be useful to me too, not just to future historians who happen upon my hard drive. I would not be able to devote the time to this without AI, even though most of the code and all the architecture is my own.
> If our jobs are at risk now or have already been lost, then we might as well take this time to make some of the things we have thought about making before but were too busy to do (or too fatigued).
Do what you think is best of course, but is a very bad recommendation for those who have lost their jobs and are unlikely to find another in software any time soon (if ever).
I said a few years ago when people were still saying I was overreacting and AI wouldn't take jobs, people need to reskill ASAP. If you've lost your job, learn how to paint walls or lay carpet before your emergency fund is up. In the unlikely event you find another software job while you're training, then great, if not you have a fall back.
Remember you're highly unlikely to make any serious money out of a bootstrapped startup. Statistically we know significantly fewer than than 1% of bootstrapped startups make money, let alone become viable replacements for a full-time income.
Don't be stupid – especially if you have a family depending on you.
By lubujackson 2025-06-1817:31 True warning, but there are a few moments in recent history when bootstrapped startups have an edge. Circa 1997-2002 (when I first came up) and, I would argue, now.
During the rise of the net, there were unexplored green fields everywhere. You could make easy bank from ads. You didn't need an office or a factory to start a company (which was more or less a requirement previously). So the idea of a bootstrapped startup was new, but seemed somewhat obvious if you were paying attention.
Now? Everyone has LLMs and can see a bit into the future. Lots of these companies will bubble up and either fold or get acquired. A few will unicorn. But the key point remains: if you are unemployed or have some time and build something functional on this new stack, your value as an employee will be much higher in the future.
Don't sacrifice what you can't, but I think there may be a softer landing for failed AI founders in the near future.
