> It's nothing short of invigorating to have this degree of control over something so powerful
I'm a SWE w/ >10 years, and you're right, this part has always been invigorating.
I suppose what's "new" here is the drastically reduced amount of cognitive energy I need build complex projects in my spare time. As someone who was originally drawn to software because of how much it lowered the barrier to entry of birthing an idea into existence (when compared to hardware), I am genuinely thrilled to see said barrier lowered so much further.
Sharing my own anecdotal experience:
My current day job is leading development of a React Native mobile app in Typescript with a backend PaaS, and the bulk of my working memory is filled up by information in that domain. Given this is currently what pays the bills, it's hard to justify devoting all that much of my brain deep-diving into other technologies or stacks merely for fun or to satisfy my curiosity.
But today, despite those limitations, I find myself having built a bespoke AI agent written from scratch in Go, using a janky beta AI Inference API with weird bugs and sub-par documentation, on a VPS sandbox with a custom Tmux & Neovim config I can "mosh" into from anywhere using finely-tuned Tailscale access rules.
I have enough experience and high-level knowledge that it's pretty easy for me to develop a clear idea of what exactly I want to build from a tooling/architecture standpoint, but prior to Claude, Codex, etc., the "how" of building it tended to be a big stumbling block. I'd excitedly start building, only to run into the random barriers of "my laptop has an ancient version of Go from the last project I abandoned" or "neovim is having trouble starting the lsp/linter/formatter" and eventually go "ugh, not worth it" and give up.
Frankly, as my career progressed and the increasingly complex problems at work left me with vanishingly less brain-space for passion projects, I was beginning to feel this crushing sense of apathy & borderline despair. I felt I'd never be able make good on my younger self's desire to bring these exciting ideas of mine into existence. I even got to the point where I convinced myself it was "my fault" because I lacked the metal to stomach the challenges of day-to-day software development.
Now I can just decide "Hmm.. I want an lightweight agent in a portable binary. Makes sense to use Go." or "this beta API offers super cheap inference, so it's worth dealing with some jank" and then let an LLM work out all the details and do all the troubleshooting for me. Feels like a complete 180 from where I was even just a year or two ago.
At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, I don't think it's overstating things to say that the advent of "agentic engineering" has saved my career.
> Original ideas are the result of the very work you’re offloading on LLMs. Having humans in the loop doesn’t make the AI think more like people, it makes the human thought more like AI output.
There was also a comment [1] here recently that "I think people get the sense that 'getting better at prompting' is purely a one-way issue of training the robot to give better outputs. But you are also training yourself to only ask the sorts of questions that it can answer well. Those questions that it will no longer occur to you to ask (not just of the robot, but of yourself) might be the most pertinent ones!"
Both of them reminded me of Picasso saying in 1968 that "
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers,"
Of course computers are useful. But he meant that they have are useless for a creative. That's still true.
"the author (pilot?) hasn't generally thought too much about the problem space, and so there isn't really much of a discussion to be had. The cool part about pre-AI show HN is you got to talk to someone who had thought about a problem for way longer than you had. It was a real opportunity to learn something new, to get an entirely different perspective."
Right, so it's about the person and how they've qualified themselves, and not about what they've built.
I feel like I've been around these parts for a while, and that is not my experience of what Show HN was originally about, though I'm sure there was always an undercurrent of status hierarchy and approval-seeking, like you suggest.
It's not about status. It's about interest. A joiner is not going to have an interesting conversation about joinery with someone who has put some flatpak furniture together.
Based on your replies here, one thing it really doesn't seem like is a community of people trying to earnestly exchange ideas or points of view. It really seems like you're viewing this whole thing as some sort of debate contest or point sparring, and its both aggravating and disappointing to read.
What is your hoped for outcome here man? To come off like enough of a jerk or obtuse enough that people just abandon the thread and you can declare victory?
I think people are retconning a lot of things onto Show HN that aren't actually part of the ethos of Show HN. That's not new; in the past, people have tried the same thing to suggest Show HN is about, say, open source software only.
I don't dispute the quality decline on Show HN or the need for some kind of intervention, but this particular argument about how AI interacts with "Show HN" is in fact introducing a new and significant element of gatekeeping to it.
Show HN is not in fact a craftspersons forum! Craft can be one of the things it's about, but it's not the only thing.
A project was one of the easiest ways to evaluate a stranger. It was a great bullshit detector. If they can make something like this then they are probably someone with ability and experience and so the rest of what they have to say is probably worth listening to. But I also agree with the parent. HN seems to be flooded with hustle and rubbish since AI has taken off. It's eternal LLMber.
I wonder if the marketing/hustlebros who only value our art as a "get rich quick scheme" (IE: the people pushing "Learn to 'code' (I hate the term 'coding')and half the new faces from india) learnt about Show HN and decided to ruin something good by making a linkedin post about "how great of a marketing avenue" we are and the vibecoded slop pushers listened in full force because they know nothing about our industry and thus don't know how valuable a non-salesy place to talk trade is
That is a completely different category. I've never experienced a logic error due to a managed runtime and only once or twice ever due to a C++ compiler.
I certainly already experienced crashes due to JIT miscompilations, even though it was a while back, on Websphere with IBM Java implementation.
Also it is almost impossible to guarantee two runs of an application will trigger the same machine code output, unless the JIT is either very dumb on its heuristics and PGO analysis, or one got lucky enough to reproduce the same computation environment.
> Also it is almost impossible to guarantee two runs of an application will trigger the same machine code output
As long as the JIT is working properly, it shouldn't matter: the code should always run "as if" it was being run on an interpreter. That is, the JIT is nothing more than a speed optimization; even if you disable the JIT, the result should still be the same.
The learning loop and LLMs [1] is well worth reading and the anthropic blog post above concurs with it in a number of places. It's fine to use LLMs as an assistant to understanding but your goal as an engineer should always be understanding and the only real way to do that is to have to struggle to make things yourself.
Is this really that different to programming? (Maybe you haven't programmed before?)
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