This is such a great topic. On one hand academics writings are by default seen as original and a work of deep research. Unique voice of writers adds to the originality.

On the other hand AI can really be a good editor and give a final polish. But this path is fraught with danger as eventually "Editor" might turn into a "Writer"

This is something like handcrafted leather bag, quality assurance of parts like zips are okay but value lies in the craftsmanship rather than industrial production.

Another point is if writing can be done by AI, so can peer review. Then 100s of agents are just reviewing it and no real exchange of thoughts or ideas are happening. That, I feel would be a sorry state to be in

> This is something like handcrafted leather bag, quality assurance of parts like zips are okay but value lies in the craftsmanship rather than industrial production.

Nah. The value is in the branding.

There was an embarrassment a few years ago when it was discovered that one maker of fake Rolex watches was using the same movements as the branded version.

Agreed and my point is "hand crafted" itself is a "branding" and the marketing around "limited" edition and not mass produced add to the allure.

Regarding fakery I think even "Monalisa" could be faked that is inseparable from the original. We hear so many fake paintings are sold for million dollars after all the due diligence by experts. Nothing is sacrosanct against deliberate fakery but the demand and the allure of the original remain for the aficinados.

I think this is not America specific and decline could be even steeper when today's kids are gonna grow up.

I see most of the kids are constantly on mobile and when they are not, they feel a void. It was almost similar to not having friends in pre social media age.

I see people getting more and more absorbed in screen so much so to forget greeting people. This happens to me all the time , someone known coming out of elevator, I am ready to greet, but they simply did not notice or noticed too late and vice versa

VB6 compressed a lot of the software development loop into one environment: change a property in a control, attach a behaviour and run.

I am wondering if newer avatars of coding agents can bring that back. Two reasons 1) Code generation is getting faster 2) More and more code is becoming a detail that is expected to work

Imagine a RAD where we have a VB6 like experience and can dive into real code (agent-generated) when the abstraction breaks.

MS has been working on similar ideas recently with its PowerFX language:

https://github.com/microsoft/Power-Fx

It's not really on people's radar but it seems very interesting and I think a lot of people that aren't on HN use and interact with it daily through the apps it supports.

Yes, please.

I spent a lot of time cutting my teeth in MS Access, and would've done a whole lot more in VB6 if it didn't become deprecated so quickly. It's like a whole smooth ecosystem I expected to persist and improve just evaporated, all in favor of much more fiddly stuff or much more expensive stuff (or if you're really unlucky, both).

I would like to see a comeback in this area, with modern security features and reduced bottlenecks for scaling.

I remember in Visual Studio putting a breakpoint on a line, running the execution cursor over it step by step and seeing all variable values that are in scope change in real time. Then being able to drag the cursor back to somewhere before the breakpoint, and edit any value to see if stepping through yields better outcomes. Quite powerful and delightful that.

That was part of what was so great about it, the many different ways it provided new developers to learn and get granular feedback as they went along, without encumbering the workflow for more experienced users.

I took it for granted, expected it to always be there-- wish I had something similar to point modern juniors to.