That is generally only applicable to extremely momentary arbitrage opportunities. There's still a lot of automation though, but it's pretty boring. It's basically look at the news and make a recommendation to a fund manager or something, and various competing vendors of such, down to consumer products like that.
I certainly think both can be true, we can have different contexts of technology as we get on the train and go through this cycle Adams describes, as well as fundamentally disagree with a technology's marketing for fundamental reasons. Additionally you could be both and this isn't a conflict.
I think this is covered in the Bainbridge automation paper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation ... When the user doesn't have practiced context like you described, to be expected to suddenly have that practiced context to do the right thing in a surprise moment is untenable.
The difference for me is that the Stasi seemingly had more competent people and more people that actually believed in what they were doing and thought it effective. With none of that, these are the actions of an organization that is failing and full of incompetence. It is even more alarming how effective they could be if anyone actually believed in them, including their own leadership or if the cause actually attracted worthwhile participants.
Such competent participants flock to these terror organisations only after it has proven itself a viable career path. Compare the chaos and mayhem of the brownshirts in Germany before the war, vs the Gestapo later. Very chaotic evil vs lawful evil.
At this point in time, it's not apparent if the current regime will prevail. Thus, it's time for brownshirt tactics. When Presidential/King/Dictatorial power is fully consolidated, States' Rights are just a memory, and all nonloyal judges are fired, it's time for the disciplined Career Bureaucrats to join ICE.
You're not wrong that that's the intent, I'm just not even seeing stupid bigots that are happy with it and they also don't seem to care about that either. So, once they lose even the hateful for not being hateful enough they're just as likely to be embarrassed by all of this or fracture amongst themselves with various no true bigot fallacy infighting. This has been the more recent mini patterns at least.
We're still in 1932. Night of the long knives was in 1934 after the Nazis had consolidated power. In 1932 they were still a party of block-headed street thugs with the SA terrorizing people. One of the reasons why they had all their rallies at night (the torchlight marches) is so people couldn't see that the SA were a bunch of meatheads who did not look good in Hugo Boss.
I don't know if you're right or not, but a lot of people who would otherwise be fans of meatheaded thugs are laughing at these people. I do worry the spectre of some unstoppable idiocy is myth. People at the time weren't used to mass media at all, and there were many other dynamics that may not sum up to a succinct conclusion. Perhaps people saying they were like the new Hun or whatever made people less likely to laugh at them, but, I know these people today are also pretty hilariously inept. Like for instance they all think facial recognition doesn't work with your lower face covered, and they don't realize that they actually don't have good discipline on their mask usage, and the tools they use on their phones to try to id people aren't nearly as good as the tools regular people use to track them.
Personally I'm sympathetic to people who don't want to have to use AI, but I dislike it when they attack my use of AI as a skill issue. I'm quite certain the workplace is going to punish people who don't leverage AI though, and I'm trying to be helpful.
> but I dislike it when they attack my use of AI as a skill issue.
No one attacked your use of AI. I explained my own experience with the "Claude Opus 4.5 is next tier". You barged in, ignored anything I said, and attacked my skills.
> the workplace is going to punish people who don't leverage AI though, and I'm trying to be helpful.
The only thing I disagreed with in your post is your objectively incorrect statement regarding Claude's context behavior. Other than that I'm just trying to encourage you to make preparations for something that I don't think you're taking seriously enough yet. No need to get all worked up, it'll only reflect on you.
And, conversely, when we read a comment like yours, it sounds like someone who's afraid of computers, would maybe have decried the bicycle and automobile, and really wishes they could just go live in a cabin in the woods.
(And it's fine to do so, just don't mail bombs to us, ok?)
Since we asked you to stop hounding another user in this manner and you've continued to do it repeatedly, I've banned the account. This is not what Hacker News is for, and you've done it almost 50 times (!), almost 30 of which have been after we first asked you to stop. That is extreme, and totally unacceptable.
Many people - simonw is the most visible of them, but there are countless others - have given up trying to convinced folks who are determined to not be convinced, and are simply enjoying their increased productivity. This is not a competition or an argument.
Maybe they are struggling to convince others because they are unable to produce evidence that is able to convince people?
My experience scrolling X and HN is a bunch of people going "omg opus omg Claude Code I'm 10x more productive" and that's it. Just hand wavy anecdotes based on their own perceived productivity. I'm open to being convinced but just saying stuff is not convincing. It's the opposite, it feels like people have been put under a spell.
I'm following The Primeagen, he's doing a series where he is trying these tools on stream and following peoples advice on how to use them the best. He's actually quite a good programmer so I'm eager to see how it goes. So far he isn't impressed and thus neither am I. If he cracks it and unlocks significant productivity then I will be convinced.
>> Maybe they are struggling to convince others because they are unable to produce evidence that is able to convince people?
Simon has produced plenty of evidence over the past year. You can check their submission history and their blog: https://simonwillison.net/
The problem with people asking for evidence is that there's no level of evidence that will convince them. They will say things like "that's great but this is not a novel problem so obviously the AI did well" or "the AI worked only because this is a greenfield project, it fails miserably in large codebases".
It's true that some people will just continually move the goalposts because they are invested in their beliefs. But that doesn't mean that the skepticism around certain claims aren't relevant.
Nobody serious is disputing that LLM's can generate working code. They dispute claims like "Agentic workflows will replace software developers in the short to medium term", or "Agentic workflows lead to 2-100x improvements in productivity across the board". This is what people are looking for in terms of evidence and there just isn't any.
Thus far, we do have evidence that AI (at least in OSS) produces a 19% decrease in productivity [0]. We also have evidence that it harms our cognitive abilities [1]. Anecdotally, I have found myself lazily reaching for LLM assistance when encountering a difficult problem instead of thinking deeply about the problem. Anecdotally I also struggle to be more productive using AI-centric agents workflows in areas of expertise.
We want evidence that "vibe engineering" is actually more productive across the entire lifespan of a software project. We want evidence that it produces better outcomes. Nobody has yet shown that. It's just people claiming that because they vibe coded some trivial project, all of software development can benefit from this approach. Recently a principle engineer at Google claimed that Claude Code wrote their team's entire year's worth of work in a single afternoon. They later walked that claim back, but most do not.
I'm more than happy to be convinced but it's becoming extremely tiring to hear the same claims being parroted without evidence and then you get called a luddite when you question it. It's also tiring when you push them on it and they blame it on the model you use, and then the agent, and then the way you handle context, and then the prompts, and then "skill issue". Meanwhile all they have to show is some slop that could be hand coded in a couple hours by someone familiar with the domain. I use AI, I was pretty bullish on it for the last two years, and the combination of it simply not living up to expectations + the constant barrage of what feels like a stealth marketing campaign parroting the same thing over and over (the new model is way better, unlike the other times we said that) + the amount of absolute slop code that seems to continue to increase + companies like Microsoft producing worse and worse software as they shoehorn AI into every single product (Office was renamed to Copilot 365). I've become very sensitive to it, much in the same way I was very sensitive to the claims being made by certain VC backed webdev companies regarding their product + framework in the last few years.
I'm not even going to bring up the economic, social, and environmental issues because I don't think they're relevant, but they do contribute to my annoyance with this stuff.
> Thus far, we do have evidence that AI (at least in OSS) produces a 19% decrease in productivity
I generally agree with you, but I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that it's plausible that the slow down observed in the METR study was at least partially due to the subjects lack of experience with LLMs. Someone with more experience performed the same experiment on themselves, and couldn't find a significant difference between using LLMs and not [0]. I think the more important point here is that programmers subjective assessment of how much LLMs help them is not reliable, and biased towards the LLMs.
I think we're on the same page re. that study. Actually your link made me think about the ongoing debate around IDE's vs stuff like Vim. Some people swear by IDE's and insist they drastically improve their productivity, others dismiss them or even claim they make them less productive. Sound familiar? I think it's possible these AI tools are simply another way to type code, and the differences averaged out end up being a wash.
IDEs vs vim makes a lot of sense. AI really does feel like using an IDE in a certain way
Using AI for me absolutely makes it feel like I'm more productive. When I look back on my work at the end of the day and look at what I got done, it would be ludicrous to say it was multiple times the amount as my output pre-AI
Despite all the people replying to me saying "you're holding it wrong" I know the fix to it doing the wrong thing. Specify in more detail what I want. The problem with that is twofold:
1. How much to specify? As little as possible is the ideal, if we want to maximize how much it can help us. A balance here is key. If I need to detail every minute thing I may as well write the code myself
2. If I get this step wrong, I still have to review everything, rethink it, go back and re-prompt, costing time
When I'm working on production code, I have to understand it all to confidently commit. It costs time for me to go over everything, sometimes multiple iterations. Sometimes the AI uses things I don't know about and I need to dig into it to understand it
AI is currently writing 90% of my code. Quality is fine. It's fun! It's magical when it nails something one-shot. I'm just not confident it's faster overall
I think this is an extremely honest perspective. It's actually kind of cool that it's gotten to the point it can write most code - albeit with a lot of handholding.
I think when a moderator keeps intervening like this it really does mean that there's something wrong here. I think people would be less mad if you just went ahead and said that you have some kind of special arrangement here with this influencer and post publicly that you like them constantly spamming the site and letting their fans flood the place with deflection and appeals for donations to them. Even YouTube had to add a sponsored post disclaimer.
There's no special arrangement. The only issue is clarifying what content is welcome vs. unwelcome on HN. simonw's content is obviously welcome, and this ought to be obvious.
> I think people would be less mad
People aren't mad about this. The vast majority of this community values simonw's contributions, which are well within the sweet spot for material on HN. That's why his material gets upvoted, as minimaxir (no friend of astroturfers) has pointed out elsewhere in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46451969.
Way to respond to someone complaining that you'll find any excuse to link to your blog. Why do you think this is respectful? Someone wrote a lot about you specifically and this behavior https://www.jwz.org/blog/2002/11/engineering-pornography/
You've posted over 40 replies hounding this one user whom you seem to be fixated on. We've already asked you to stop (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44726957) but you've continued:
This is obviously an abuse of HN, regardless of who you're being aggressive towards. We ban accounts that keep doing this. If you keep doing it, we will ban you, so no more of this please.
I had to paste that into a separate browser window (jwz blocks Hacker News referral traffic) and I cannot figure out how that story is relevant to this conversation. Did you share the right link?
Despite open plugins, and mostly open end result file formats, the entirety of the media software world is built around proprietary software primarily for several reasons: Ephemeral fads have you making money in one big upfront push, integration of some new technique doesn't lend itself to open standards, or the fact that the actual bulk of paying customers are presumably working musicians with budgets, and that market is ultimately small. The side effect of this, much like radios, rc planes and drones, and many other hobbies, is that a collection of smaller product producing organizations have an even smaller, more even playing field full of smaller professionals and some amateurs. Some of the modular hardware producers have the right idea and provide free versions of their hardware as plugins as a marketing gimmick for their actual hardware. However, outside of the Linux world, the mystique of a proprietary salve that will supplant your creative block pushes people towards short sighted sales pushes instead of trying to lock in a give and take interaction with the broader community.
But I would love every thing that you list. I think things like PipeWire for better or worse are pushing things towards sanity, or least, better ideas for managing the mess in the open source world, which is decades in the making.
