We’re awash in these claims without evidence. A so-called “founder” of a company with no reputation or economic impact to speak of claims the entire world has changed and they’re 100x engineers now, and the code has never been better and the features have never shipped faster. But there’s no evidence for that claim in the economic data, no explosion of products, no new features in any product I use that isn’t just a shitty chatbot integration. Where is the 100x more software going? Why does the internet appear to suck more than ever? What are other people seeing that I’m not? I see 100x more “thought leaders,” 100x more text to sift through, 100x more lame resume-padding repos and budgeting apps, 10x more grift and vitriol online, 10x less collaboration between developers, but on the other end of that extrusion, people are just lonelier, more tired, more stressed, and pissed off about how shitty software has become.
> What are other people seeing that I’m not? I see 100x more “thought leaders,” 100x more text to sift through, 100x more lame resume-padding repos and budgeting apps, 10x more grift and vitriol online, 10x less collaboration between developers, but on the other end of that extrusion, people are just lonelier, more tired, more stressed, and pissed off about how shitty software has become.
The goal unto itself. Chaos, supported by a socially-reinforced shell game.
This is my daily intrusive thought. "Why the hell am I doing any of this? Why am I not yelling louder at people that have so much and give so little?"
This website is full of people that could save millions of human lives in aggregate, but choose not to and actively argue against the idea because, and I do swear it's a damned curse at this point, "there is no incentive to do it."
I'm not even remotely rich. I have no "savings" or "investments". Yet I have a comfortable life in a house with access to food and care as I need. Sometimes I really hate it.
To your last part, then you’re ok man. Sounds like you have your kindness and empathy intact. It sounds like given the avenue, you would organize for what is right. You have perspective but don’t let it consume you. You need to be healthy because if you care, there might be a chance in the future where you can put that care toward change. And you need to be in your best state to have the largest impact.
There are many people in this world who have more, view people as dirt, and dedicate their lives to keeping people down. Good, kind people who are disempowered by a system that betrayed us all are not at fault. Feel better man.
You cannot change the world, you need to accept that. However, you can have a hell of an impact on your surroundings, like your close family, neighborhood or city. Focus on that. Social media made us forget that.
In its current incarnation, superlogical is exactly the same as the new herdr, with the same gaps. A TUI does not appear in their backlog either. They are a native app.
Yes, but Rex is built on libghostty with the multiplexing and agent integration built in, built by people I trust who don’t let the LLM write all their docs.
These days, I constantly find myself filled with a kind of techno-dysphoria, where not only do I not want to use the tech in the way it’s being packaged/sold, but I’m filled with dread and disgust by the idea of people who do so breathlessly anticipate and proselytize its arrival.
The idea that anyone ever read a Gibson novel and thought, “can’t wait,” truly boggles my mind.
Thank you! This is a huge sticking point for me. There is no knowing the code without experiencing the code. If nothing else, you have to read the tests to know they verify what you think they do. Even then, you might know it does what you want, but can’t know it doesn’t do anything it shouldn’t.
This is a wildly online take. Humans highly value authenticity and many professional writers still write their first draft with a pen or pencil.
David Foster Wallace famously described writing with a pen and paper instead of a word processor because it forced him to slow down enough to think deeply, which I find very relevant to this whole debate.
There is no substitute for slow thinking. Your brain can’t really “move up the stack” until you understand the layer you’re on. All abstractions paper over important details. All shortcuts are cut short. You cannot produce quality writing without doing the slow, dlaborious work of choosing your own words.
I think devs and people on HN way overestimate how much the average person knows about or cares about or desires to interact with a computer. Whatever the job becomes, if you like talking to the computer and know how to get it to do anything besides show an email or youtube, you’re ahead of the curve and can likely stay there.
I think you are underestimating. Before this was true, but school curriculum for computing has changed a lot over the past decade and they now teach Scratch at primary schools and Python in middle school. This was pushed by Bill Gates and other people in tech who told everyone that there is a shortage and anyone can learn to code. I would find it strange if someone by age 16 has never programmed before. Obviously having done programming and being good are two different things but the field has become saturated at an entry level at least.
Many people in the field now aren't nerds anymore either but people who are just incentivised by financial prospects.
Sure the kids get "exposure" to Scratch but they're not really teaching it. It's not like the teachers are programmers. They just let the kids make little scrapbooks. It took me to show my kids triggers, messages, and loops.
I went back to college to switch careers. We all had to take a class to learn what a folder is and how to save a file because a lot of today's youth doesn't know this.
I waffle on this a lot but I come down on this side more often than not. Similar to “Everyone has a kitchen but people still go out to eat”-type thinking.
Yes, as the cost to build falls, teams may shrink or businesses might just choose to get more done (don’t we all have ever-growing backlogs?). Additionally, companies that couldn’t afford a team of developers might be able to afford one developer assisted with AI, or a company that could only afford one or two developers can now operate at a much higher level.
The same way indie developers have always outmaneuvered larger companies. A number of my favorite apps are built by a single developer (Overcast, Callsheet, Carrot, Widgetsmith, Octal) or small teams focused on building a good product. Caring. That might seem simplistic and it's not to say no one working at a larger company cares, that's clearly not true, but there is an attention to detail and craftsmanship, not to mention soul, I find lacking in most software produced by larger companies.
I have a product that competes (or rather they compete with me? I was "first to market" for all that matters) with a product produced by a company (no clue the size, but I'm 1 person, they seem to employ multiple people). I think my product is better because I "Sweat the small stuff" and spend more time working on improving the experience than they do.
Perhaps I'm delusional. Maybe people think their product is better but the people who have switched don't seem to think so. I don't solicit information about them from their previous clients but I've heard enough "This is so much easier/clearer" or "That's it? The old tool required XYZ!" to believe it.
I think there are two different kinds of "winning" here. One is to be the biggest there is, and we see a lot of examples of that. More, more, more. Gigantic headcounts. Think Google now.
And we have countless examples of that working. Small company invents a neat thing, big company sees that, allocates 10x the resources on it, and small company is lost.
But we also see that that titanic companies are difficult to maneuver, and a little speedboat team can end-around and run for the goal line. Think Google back then.
It would be as if everyone had a cook but it could only put out bland, generic, but nutritionally complete, meals. Some people would tweak their home-cook to produce more flavorful, exciting dishes. Others would buy templates/recipes from people who wanted to spend their time doing that. And others still would just go to a restaurant where the entire process is handled end-to-end.
I do love straining an analogy. :)
I'll grant you that your future is possible. If "searching" via LLM for a tool just offers to build it for you, I'm not sure what that does to the software market. But I have a feeling that even with more people "building" instead of "buying" there will always exist a majority of people who don't want to bother with "building". Heck, there are people in this industry that I would never call a "builder" and there are plenty of people across all industries that simply don't have the drive/interest/etc in building, even when it's easier. I bet if you grabbed someone from the dawn of computing and plopped them down just pre-LLM they would be amazed and flabbergasted "Why isn't everyone writing software custom for their needs?? It's SO much easier than it was when you had to learn punchcards! The web (how very interesting by the way!) offers free courses to learn programming that you can do on the device you carry in your pocket!".
It seems that no matter how easy we make programming, there will always be people willing to pay others to "manage" that process. See also: YouTube has videos for anything you might need to do home-maintenance-wise, and yet the trade jobs are in incredibly high demand [0]. Perhaps with LLM + cheap robotics + unlimited/cheap energy this changes but we are still 2 parts away from that and even today's LLMs are just starting to show fruit w.r.t. controlling robots.
[0] PS: If you are leaving tech, go into this. Respond to people's calls, even if you can't get there _today_, respond and put them on a schedule. Use your tech skills to help automate/manage this. I've considered this every time I've needed just about anything done and gone through the miserable process of getting ghosted by multiple people before finally getting someone out.
> It would be as if everyone had a cook but it could only put out bland, generic, but nutritionally complete, meals.
Bro, good engineering IS boring and it's supposed to be.
The whole reason that Software Engineering is not actually engineering is because the field is too young for there to be established, rigorous engineering codes that must be adhered to. Can you imagine if every bridge you went over or every elevator you rode in had been built with arbitrarily chosen technologies by uncertified "engineers" using the latest fad in engineering?
I think one of the outcomes of this great shift where most programming output is being produced by LLMs is that we're going to start seeing much more consistency across software implementations. It will be boring. And honestly that is probably going to be a good thing.
I agree the core logic should be boring, the user experience is another story.
There are a number of open source tools that have the same, on paper, features as a paid product. And yet the paid product still exists. Is it because Pixelmator Pro produces a better "blur" than GIMP? No, it's because Pixelmator Pro is more enjoyable to use, has a better user interface.
So yes, your auth/RPC/whatever should be incredibly boring, and now that LLMs can handle that aspect reliably we can focus (if we choose) on improving other aspects of the software and that will be the differentiating aspect.
I think you underestimate how many people would be willing to battle a computer if it meant doubling their salaries. Think of all the teachers with STEM degrees being paid $60k, if someone offered them $120k to prompt a computer for a while I'm sure many would come running.
The most passionate, intelligent people 1. aren’t spending a lot of time on smartphones, video games and crypto and 2. aren’t as much smarter or better at predicting the future as the barely above average people who mistakenly count themselves in their ranks like to think.
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