NichoPaolucci

Well... On HN, the crowd is largely technical and the rhetoric has been that our jobs are no longer useful or required. Seeing 'that' idea fail (in any capacity, efficiency gain and usefulness of the technology aside) is probably some schadenfreude, and a bit of self preservation.

I also believe that a lot of the hype has been unrealistic, so IF there is a bubble and IF it is bursting, I'd hope it to be a wake up call and give investors, companies, and regular people more realistic expectations about what we're working with here.

I am investigative of this scenario, but it can go two ways, if models continue to approve in leaps (IMO):

1 - People build more and more complex implementations, and your "working mess" software DOES still need time to maintain it, is unstable, and they will still want something that "just works" so they hand it off to another person / group. (This would be AI effectively creating "more software + jobs"

2 - People build more and more complex implementations, and AI no longer creates a "working mess" as it improves, it creates "working software" that does not need time to maintain it, is stable, and they do not need to hand it off to another person / group.

I think it's more likely that scenario 1 is going to be the case. I've seen the things people are building around my company. They are enthused, creative, and useful - but need a ton of work, and are continuing on the path of "usable mess", and are now getting fatigue because they need to maintain the tooling they built...

In your scenario anyone who had $1B or more before midnight is now $1B poorer, so I don't think people would be very happy with that engineer either, regardless of whether there's a break glass system.

Don't these sort of conflict with being "aggressively pro AI"?

> how awful everything is to read lately > flooded with AI generated content, all of it terrible > everything sounding identical and everything being a rambling unconcise mess.

I can see the benefits of AI and enjoy using the technology - but, like many have said, it's wreaking havoc on the "content" that's out there nowadays. Gotta take some bad with the good, I suppose.

Yeah... N=2-3 here but my team prefers having 1 main agent and maybe a couple more finely tuned ones for review / analysis / security... I generally have 2-3 chats going on different tasks but more than that and I lose the plot.

Well, the community never made it a very welcoming place... But, I think a part of this is that it's just faster to throw a Q into ChatGPT. There's no waiting for a response, a major bonus is the non-hostility + willingness to respond to 'stupid' questions.

I think that assuming work can be done more easily in the future should not stop people from doing work that needs to be done in the present.

(If a painter knew that the camera was coming out I would not want them to throw their canvas away)

Hard agree on the prompting rabbit hole.

I've done it a handful of times, I'll get a little ambitious... "Oh, 6.1 Sol can totally handle this" and have it spin up a project, keep going, keep going.

Eventually, I get to a point where I start to do the homework and I have to step way back to "fully understand" the work from the ground up... It sucks, but I've largely stopped losing time to that.

For me, "pair programming" and incremental changes beats the "one shot" approach every single time.

We cannot seem to skip the stage of understanding (as much as some people on my team want to!)

Well... I think the converse to this is the companies that WOULD pay you (slightly less than they currently pay Atlassian) TO replicate those products.

I expect some BRUTAL competition for these larger software companies. My company just recently replaced our CRM with an in-house tool. (Of course, the maintenance / buildout of that is costly, but it's eventually going to be less than we are paying for the third-party CRM)

Honestly, I cannot personally decide whether or not this is Jevon's Paradox in action or not. In theory, that software could be entirely hands off (Claude write me a 1:1 implementation of Salesforce CRM and make it never go down) but in reality, someone is going to want it tweaked, modified, changed, and thus we now have an internal CRM that we own that requires some level of expertise. Maybe it's not a software engineer, but a software engineer is probably the most well equipped to take that process over...

Who knows, though.

Not picking a side, but do you really think that language models should have a political bias? I personally don't interface with AI in a way that engages political / social bias - but if I did I definitely wouldn't want that to be predetermined, whether left or right.

Though, with the safeguards put into place on these models, they are naturally going to have SOME amount of bias, but we should be working to minimize that, no?

To play devil's advocate, couldn't certain modifications to a heat pump damage the unit?

I'm guessing they made "happy path" decisions thinking most people aren't going to modify cycle timing, or know how to do that or what it entails. That 3 minutes was probably decided on by a group of engineers who thoroughly know the product. Especially if they provide a warranty.

You may know / understand a heat pump system but if I modified values with no safeguards on mine I'd probably break it within the hour.

> the app owns the workspace, the editor, and the wire — it never assembles prompts behind your back.

Thanks JetBrains, I assumed the app would assemble prompts behind my back, so I'm glad they clarified that.

If they bothered reading this that would have been removed. I understand smaller players... Vibe Coders, Solo projects, something on its initial commit (to be edited / cleaned up / improved).

But, from JetBrains? Bad sign for the industry, IMO. Is it that fucking hard to have a decent technical writer collect some some human-readable documentation? This just exudes lack of effort.

You're right - having many possible implementations is NOT the problem here, if a natural language spec covers all the 'necessary' functionality of a piece of software, the implementation does not matter (whether it's implementation ID 4 or ID 27548323)

My argument is more of a forecast, and your last paragraph fits it correctly. I don't think we'll be able to maintain it once we get past a certain level of complexity. Or the maintenance / modification of that specification will be much more difficult to work with, to the point that we'll decide code is the solution.

Hah. This reminds me of "Fight Club". He's all beat up in the office and nobody has the guts to ask what happened.

Good luck in training, I've always wanted to get into BJJ but don't have the time right now.

Yeah - I wish my team would adopt a "no AI prose" rule for team communication.

It's one thing to say "please review this code that I used AI to generate". It's entirely different to say "Please read this 7 page document that AI generated about a plan to generate this code, and I'm passing it off to you as my plan"

It puts the onus of understanding onto the reader (writing a wall of text used to put the onus of understanding on the writer), and if the prompter hasn't read the output, then it's putting most of that effort onto the reader.

Horrible in practice, and yes - I can tell every single time someone dumps an AI generated message into the chat, because it's not succinct, it rarely directly answers my question, it's overly verbose, it has no style, and it lacks the depth of understanding of how our team works together.