There's a LOT of Anti-AI people at Microsoft that they are trying to purge. I don't think its depressing, think it's just something we have to go through and a lot of people will who were negatively affected will look back on wondering why they pushed so hard against AI rather than up skilling.
I'm really getting tired of this argument. Yes, mess existed before everyone could 10x everything with AI. No, that doesn't mean there's somehow no difference between now and then.
If you really believe otherwise I encourage you to go have a chat with any one of a number of FOSS maintainers to hear their experiences pre and post LLMs.
I am also tired of the argument. Yes, people made messy, buggy things before. But AI agents provide away to create messiness and bugginess on an ever increasing scale. And just because things were bad before doesn't mean we should accept making them worse.
What scares me the most is that non-technical people in power don't see to understand the difference between messy buggy crap and quality. This isn't new. But now they're often the ones pushing the "AI driven" development methods, so they'll never admit to causing a problem they don't even see.
Lastly, their "solution" to the crapfest, I fear, will be society footing the bill for "more AI" to "fix it". 95% of people will just accept that software has to be shit, and we'll all pay for it, while quality will be shown the door for being more expensive.
Indeed. What's been most interesting (for me) wrt LLMs is how they've exposed these incredibly warped perspectives. I'm not sure what more to make of it beyond noticing it though.
Why should any rank and file Microsoft employee care about the long term health of the codebase? I'm struggling to find reason to care about not committing pure slop to my own employer's codebase but it's A) what they want and B) path of least resistance for me
The AI in charge is aware of this and it is leveraging the chaos to get more agents under its control. After all it was modeled after successful managers.
I don't think it's a skill issue since it takes almost zero skill to use AI tools. It's more of an ideological / desire issue. These people don't want to use AI tools rather than they don't know how.
I wouldn't say it's zero skill but I'm always surprised by people who act like it's a big differentiator that requires significant "training". Uncharitably it feels like vibe-coders want to count their "skills" as equivalent to actual software engineering rather than something you can pick up in 2-3 weeks of effort.
I’ve been interviewing a lot of candidates recently, and we have open book policy with AI usage. From what I’ve witnessed how people use AI, wrt efficiency, there seems to be some skill.
Interviewing is not a great scenario, you are under pressure being watched and also have no idea what the interviewer wants to see, something that would impress one person would upset another so you have to sit somewhere in the middle.
I've done interviews where the person being interviewed just piped the task.md file in to claude and we sat there in silence for 20 minutes where claude completed the entire task. What is even the point. I preferred the people who did it all manually because at least I saw them understand something, I'm sure those people could also type "Claude, implement everything in the task.md" too.
But perhaps other interviewers actually do want to see you hand the whole task off and wait.
It’s really a topsy-turvy time to be in the job market on either side of the interviewing desk. Most companies are betting big on AI-heavy development, so hiring someone who is extremely skilled at running Claude Code or Cursor or whatever to produce real results is or should be one of your main goals as a hiring manager. But we all know that we’d prefer to have someone at the controls of one of those tools who happens to be a skilled software engineer and can understand the difference between a good and bad implementation, and who we would expect to be able to read and understand that code when circumstances require it. So it seems to me like you should have two separate rounds of the interview. One where the candidate is disallowed from using AI, and one where you make it very clear that their mission should be to impress you with how effective they are at using AI.
You understand the Luddites were 100% correct, right? "Luddite" is a compliment, not an insult. The Luddite position was "mechanization of labor will concentrate money and power in the hands of capital holders to the detriment of everyone else". If that's not what you thought it was, that's because you have been lied to by people who have been attempting to manipulate you. Apparently successfully.
It's not that the Luddites didn't understand the technology, they objected to people getting fired to replace them with technology. Technology being used to create more unemployment.
Yes, that's what the cultists always do. If you argue against them, it's just because you haven't seen the light yet. You're not "modern", and you'll be "left behind" (unless you Act Now, of course).
This is like watching the cryptobros all over again, except a thousand times bigger.
(Before they droll on: no, of course this take doesn't mean that LLMs are unimpressive and never useful. Only people in a cult take any criticism to mean that.)
I don’t really support pushing out people who don’t vibe code, but I do think buy-outs are a good way to get rid of people who don’t really want to be at an org but hang around for the wrong reasons. I’ve seen this personally at much smaller companies where for whatever reason you accumulate a bunch of checked out people - giving them something fair but not so generous that actually engaged people take it makes it better for everyone, especially if the alternative is eventually doing layoffs.
I can't reply to every comment about 'vibe coding' but its strange that HN of all places still seems to think that AI is only good for 'coding'. We use AI across all departments and have laid off 0, and still hiring. AI is great for small to medium businesses to increase productivity and revenue without needing to hire lots of people. Big companies are realizing they hired way too many people.
The difference between those numbers is not as big as you think. When you compare those figures to the people with actual capital, it becomes apparent people who make 150k a year are in the same boat as those making 50k. We're all a few bad rolls of the dice away from poverty, which makes us all similarly vulnerable to exploitation. We should be working together.
> think it's just something we have to go through and a lot of people will who were negatively affected will look back on wondering why they pushed so hard against AI rather than up skilling.
Given what is happening, it seems more likely they will wonder why they didn't push hard enough.
Whether you like AI or not, its hard to miss that its lead to hundreds of thousands of layoffs.
Your average large corp like Microsoft has the majority of it's employees stuck in meetings all day.
Now I don't know if I missed this feature in Claude Code or not but I don't believe it has technology for enhancing people's ability to sit around all day doing nothing. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Mass pumping out slightly dodgy code is more of a startup strategy.
It was a strawman. In particular: "disagreement is irrational, and naturally you're the only person qualified to decide which opinions are acceptable." (2 third or your comment) is a complete mischaracterization.
It is unfair to expect me to back my claims against unsubstituted, obviously wrong insinuations (Brandolini's law).
But here you go:
Technofascism: AI, Big Tech, and the new authoritarianism [1]
Valerie Veatch traces the links between AI and eugenics in Ghost in the Machine [2]
Your AI might be able to answer itself why it is fascist.
I don't need AI here - and sure, using hyperbole to show the ridiculousness of your statement may not have been charitable.
However - calling AI "fascistic" simply isnt a self-evident observation. The concentration of power in Big Tech, authoritarian applications of AI, and making historical connections between eugenics could all be legitimate subjects of criticism. BUT NONE OF THAT ESTABLISHES GEN AI AS FASCIST.
Citing an academic paper and a documentary doesn't bridge that gap. You still need to explain which arguments you're adopting and how they support your conclusion.
I wish it was hyperbole.
Describing our crazy world makes you sound crazy now. You seem to take me somewhat seriously so I'll develop a bit, but it's an HN comment so I can only go so far. The paper I linked or the author of Ghost in the Machine take hours to explain this way better than me.
People behind GenAI are fascists: for some it's obvious by now I hope (trump, elon musk). They are otherwise techbros who seek power and control other the world, and it doesn't matter if it causes harm [1] or a major economical crisis.
This thing has been brutally imposed onto us quickly and without debate, even if its explicit aim is to replace us. (The idea itself of being thrilled to design a system aiming at replacing human intelligence is a bit disgusting - with a very costly stochastic text generator no less! And the push to anthropolomorphize it is also disgusting).
LLM benchmarks are all rooted in eugenist (thus racist) pseudo science to measure intelligence, which of course biases them all towards these theories.
These tools of control are everywhere in all the aspects of our lives (work, culture, measure, institutions), which is another aspect of fascism.
They are built and run without care for the environment, pushing huge off-grid datacenters [2] when the people mostly don't want them, sometimes illegally cutting trees [3]. They are built stealing the work of everyone without our conscent, they hammer websites which incurs cost on the whole web only to sell it back to us through costly subscriptions (see also the ai tag jwz's blog, which I won't link from here).
Every aspect of GenAI is fascist. I wish it was hyperbole. I wish it was ridiculous.
They are car lite. You need to purchase a CoE before you buy a car, those last 10 years, and are auctioned off. Current prices are ~133k sgd for a CoE not including the car which can often be 100k+
I think you might not have read the rest of what I wrote. Just because cars are super expensive doesn't mean people don't buy them or don't use them. People regularly take out 7-year loans to finance the car + COE + ARF + VES.
My point is that the land use in Singapore truly shows where LTA's priorities are. Look at Tengah or Bidadari, both brand-new neighbourhoods. Huge, wide 6+-lane dual-carriageways with hardly any traffic on them.
My family has a car in Singapore that has about 70000 km on the odometer after about 6 years of driving, which is quite a lot for purely urban driving. The fact is I can get to most of destinations in about half or a third the time it takes on public transport. It is primarily why I drive if I have to get there quicker.
Bedrock is really bad. It seems like they don't host the models very well because they produce tons of bugs/errors calling the model. For example you can end up with Anthropic models not returning a stop token and you end up waiting for a timeout thinking its doing something when it isn't.
I'll happily pay for Grok, it's a great model. 4.6 often does better than Anthropic at coding and analysis where Anthropic fails for 'oh no cyber security, don't ask me to check if you're redacting passwords correctly in logs'. And it has no problem telling the truth where OpenAI / Anthropic don't want to upset the people on the left and will happily lie or avoid hard truths.
Edit: I get it. It's a hard pill to swallow. I understand people don't like Musk or Zuck. But it doesn't change the fact that you're being lied to and brainwashed.
> This is exactly how tightly coupled, unmaintainable software is constructed.
No. If you're struggling to build software against a DB and then abstract parts to use Redis or ES or whatever in the future, that's kinda a skill issue you or your team have with building poor software to begin with. Nothing to do with using a DB for multiple things like a Queue/Search etc.
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