That and you can find good people that get your vision or just do good work and use them on your next project. Or you can mentor a promising person. Etc. Mapping HI to AI as the gp did misses all the major deficiencies of collaborating with a team of agents vs competent humans.
> But the bottleneck was never the code. It was always the human attention, the engineering judgment, the ability to hold a coherent vision for a system. We just didn't notice because writing code felt like the hard part.
I keep wondering what I’m missing in the AI enthusiasm, and maybe this is a big part of it? Writing code has never felt like the hard part to me.
In my 20s, I was excited about using a computer. AIM trained fast touch typing. I learned modal editing with vim. I learned all the common Unix commands to transform text files and filesystems in myriad ways. I learned to script and to create my own productivity keyboard shortcuts. I ran Gentoo Linux at home. Then I started my software career.
There, I learned git inside and out. I learned that IDEs all have vim keybindings, so you can have seamless language integration alongside speed-of-thought text manipulation. I became an expert in Java.
When I’m programming, if I know what I’m building, I’m moving at maximum speed. I’m not thinking about typing or syntax or using my mouse much. I’m learning the shape of the code I’m changing. I’m figuring out the right changes to make for myself and future work. When I pause, I’m pausing to think. Sometimes I realize the entire approach won’t work, but I learned something valuable, and I restart the work in a better direction with fewer pauses.
The code was never the bottleneck. Coding never feels like the hard part. When it does feel hard, I build a better abstraction or use IDE refactoring tools or craft a gnarly Unix pipeline with one or more sed invocations.
But this AI excitement is making me think perhaps this combination of skills is unusual. Maybe a lot of devs haven’t been exposed to great tooling or mastered the tools. If I put myself in those shoes, then coding seems much harder, and AI coding seems like a bigger win.
If I were in my 20s today, I might not spend so much time mastering the skills I take for granted. In that context, AI would feel like a magic productivity boost. For my part, though, I got excited about software engineering when I truly grasped that none of it was magic.
Someone in a HN thread a few months ago put it in a way that makes a lot of sense to me: "AI seems good at things you are not good at."
So, if you're not actually a programmer, or not a good programmer, you look at AI output and think "Wow, I could never have done that so well/fast. AI is great at this!" It's solving something he's not good at.
On the other hand, if you already are a good/skilled programmer, AI is not solving anything for you. Its output is flawed and has to be manually fixed and refactored. When you consider the prompting and the waiting and the cajoling and the fixing and the refactoring, it's not really doing things faster than you could.
I'm not an artist. To me, AI art seems great, because it's doing something I am very bad at. I think the same is true for AI programming.
> On the other hand, if you already are a good/skilled programmer, AI is not solving anything for you. Its output is flawed and has to be manually fixed and refactored. When you consider the prompting and the waiting and the cajoling and the fixing and the refactoring, it's not really doing things faster than you could.
This seems to not coincide with the reality of some very skilled programmers saying exactly the opposite.
Just to quote the latest one, here's Linus Torvalds, who I think we can agree is a good programmer:
> AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one.
> It may not have been that "clearly" even just a year ago, but it's no
longer in question today.
> There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will
actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of
those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used
it.
This rings true to me. There are some pretty notable software engineers that are saying otherwise, that they are getting tons of value out of AI, but there are also some very notable engineers saying otherwise. There are studies that say there are no improvements, some that say there are small improvements, some that say there are actually decreases. We're very far from any settled understanding of what LLM use is doing
Lots of noise, and no actually measureable improvements. Just a lot of anecdotes
And people should keep in mind how much money that there is riding on this. Especially on a site like this, there's probably people who are multi-, maybe even hundred-, millionaires if their AI bets continue to pay off.
I dunno. There's a lot of dust in the air. All I know is I hate using it for code generation. I don't like being personally accountable for code I didn't write. I don't like TDD and I don't think large test suites are a guarantee of good software anyways. I'd rather work with a team of eager juniors than prompt an LLM all day.
this is pure cope, and the realm of things you are better than it at will continue to shrink, and you need to be mentally and economically prepared for this.
When you talk about the point or purpose of open source, what are you referring to? I think of Stallman, print drivers, and users owning their work, so your assertions about the point of open source ring false to me.
You’re getting open source and free software mixed up. As I said, Open Source was a reformulation of Free Software to make it more business-friendly. Free Software is fundamentally a moral stance (it is wrong to prevent sharing); Open Source is fundamentally a pragmatic stance (building software is better when it is publicly collaborative).
Considering that Free Software predates Open Source, and many popular OSI-approved licenses also predate Open Source, how can you justify your core claim upthread:
> The people that see open source code and assume that it is being developed collaboratively are not being unreasonable – that’s the purpose of the open source movement. If that’s an inaccurate assumption for your software, then that’s fine – but it’s you that is breaking social norms, not them.
It sounds like you think anyone who selects an OSI-approved license, and makes the code publicly available, is somehow explicitly opting-in to the Open Source movement, and users should "reasonably" expect collaborative development as the default. Is that accurate? Because it seems completely nonsensical to me, especially considering the licenses predate the movement.
When you come across a random project using an OSI-approved license, there's no way to know the developers' motivations for selecting that license, if they haven't explicitly stated it. Your default seems to be an assumption that they're opting in to the "open source movement" and all of the social norms that you wrap up in that, but your assumption can be completely wrong, and that doesn't mean the developers are "breaking social norms" of a movement that they never subscribed to in the first place!
that's an interesting point. how important was user participation in the development of software for RMS? he wanted to be able to share his modifications with anyone. presumably that includes upstream. so even if not said explicitly, i'd argue that collaboration was implied.
OP says open source is a reformulation of free software.
Stallman created free software and is distinctly against open source, which is more or less free software but without the philosophy, the concern for user rights [1]. Associating RMS and his printer with the purpose of open source would somewhat be a mistake / a faux pas (but would be nailing it for the purpose of free software!).
The purpose of free software is user freedom (and not the cooperative development). The original purpose of open source is selling the idea of free software to the corporate world by making it less scary to them, by trying to remove its political part. [I suspect the people who created open source might have been sensitive to the user freedom aspect and wanted to convince corporate to do free software for this reason but thought that hiding this part was a good strategy [2, 3]. I personally think this was a fatal mistake: nowadays, although the infrastructure is mostly open source (and has been succeeding in this regard), end user facing software is still mostly proprietary exactly because software companies don't think they ought to do free software.]
I don't think the cooperative development part is in the purpose of open source. In any case, the open source definition and the free software definition don't concern themselves with this and are purely about what you can do with the code.
Of course open source development models are intimately bound to open source and free software but and were one of the things sold to corporate as more efficient.
I live just west of Lake Michigan, and what you described would be a high-snow winter here. The lake effect is real. I grew up in the Cleveland area, and I was surprised how much less snow we get in Wisconsin. Longer, colder winters, though.
I lived in Chicagoland for a few years as well, I didn’t notice much of a difference. I would assume that’s similar to Wisconsin.
Of course, I was in apartments with covered parking and snow removal services the whole time, so I didn’t need to care too much.
I do remember the guys in the Chicago office talking about when they got a foot or so of snow and had to walk to the nearby hotel to spend the night, because it wasn’t safe to drive home. I heard stories like that from people in the Michigan office too, but in my 20 years working I still never ran into it. Just lucky I guess.
> lurk in the middle of the road and make a left turn once oncoming traffic is stopped for the red
In the jurisdictions I'm familiar with, this is the proper way to make a left-hand turn. Many intersections are designed such that this is the only realistic way to ever turn left (high traffic, no left arrow).
Most red light rules are written against entering the intersection on red. If you're already in the intersection, you're allowed to safely proceed through and out of the intersection on red. That can be challenging, of course, if oncoming traffic is running the red light.
Just to add a counterpoint, I was hired as employee #3 in 2011. In 2020, I was able to sell 5.8% of my stake for $200K (as part of Series C). In 2021, I sold another 4.4% for $500K (Series D on terms too good to refuse). I still hold equity or options in nearly 0.5% of the company (which is still private).
My wife and I used about half the proceeds of those sales to buy a house (cash offer) in late 2021.
I don’t know what proportion of early employees get screwed, but people who do well are usually smart to avoid posting publicly about it (and I am apparently an idiot).
Maybe I'm bitter from getting burned but I don't think this is really counterpoint. Employee #3 you're just shy of being a co-founder and 2011 was an era where equity grants were real and companies weren't yet so clever about handing out Leprechaun gold.
EDIT: Random aside, but I looked up "leprechaun gold" and I guess the trope of a gold-like substance that disappears from your pocket when you're not looking is actually from Harry Potter and not a part of the traditional folklore.
It would be worse than the nationwide average. Battleground swing states would swing way right. The Republican voters in the suburbs have passports at a much higher rate than the Democrat voters in the poor neighborhoods.
That assumes academic achievement should be the primary aim of childhood. What I learned in school was incredibly important—don’t get me wrong—but what I learned over the summer was arguably more important.
As a child of divorce, I cherished 6 straight weeks at my mom’s house (we only visited every other weekend during school). As a working class kid, I earned probably half my annual spending money over the summer.
My wife and I now have kids, and we’ve always loved to travel (and needed to just to visit family). Summer is the only time available for extended family trips (2+ weeks).
Maybe to you, but I was broke during and shortly after college. If I could have picked up some gig work when I needed it, that would have been a huge help.
