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Microsoft Account bugs locked me out of Notepad – are Thin Clients ruining PCs? (windowscentral.com)
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I work in academia and I've gotten most of my people to switch to Macs and no, Linux is not an option here. I have about eight Windows PCs against about sixty MacBook Airs and guess which platform causes me the most work? 1:20 issue ratio. Even simple things like SMB in Windows 11 are hopelessly broken.
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>I don't want people to switch away from Windows; I want Microsoft to treat its premier operating system like it used to.[...] and Windows 12 is ultimately an agentic AI OS, I wouldn't be surprised if more people stick with a debloated Windows 11, just as others did with Windows 10 Is there any justification for the first part other than that the authors job at windowscentral.com depends on it? Because I'm not seeing it in the article which amounts to the digital version of Stockholm syndrome. If even the author is predicting that this is what the next windows will look like, why aren't you running for the hills
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I believe this is related to known issues with KB5074109 It hit Both Win11 24H2 and 25H2.
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Switch to linux, don't look back
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The renaming of “my computer” to “this PC” was quite telling.
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To be clear, this is the horrible "new" Notepad "app" that I absolutely hated and instantly removed when it was forced upon everyone. I doubt the old "edit field in a wrapper" one which has been nearly the same since Win95 has this problem. (My newest machine is now running Linux.)
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For what it matters, Windows Server 2025 still has the edit field in a wrapper.
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Markdown support and the like are useful but their need to cram AI and account sign-in into it definitely seemed over the top. When they got rid of Wordpad I kind of anticipated them trying to pivot Notepad more in that direction.
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The subscription to his own machine had bugs that prevented him from using a basic windowed text editor and that isn't the last straw?
Every horrible windows story is yet another glorious day for linux. Fyi, in Mint if you search application for "notepad", "Text Editor" is the first result. That is curated search done right. Search for notepad on windows and you probably get an ad for a travel website.
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Cinnamon is cool and all but I prefer KDE Plasma. It seems to eliminate all the pain points Linux desktop environments typically have and everything just works. Pair it with Debian and you got a solid system.
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It just makes sense to show travel deals. Why would an OS show text editors when searching for text editors? Obviously it can show something far more lucrative by matching what it knows from spyware AI taking screenshots of your every action.
I only use my windows machine because I can swap out parts stuff and is more hackable but macos is so much more beautifully designed. Sometimes I prefer one machine over the other I rarely wish for anything other than sometimes being unable to transfer data between the two systems.
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> I only use my windows machine because I can swap out parts stuff and is more hackable but macos is so much more beautifully designed. That's definitely a good reason to use a PC instead of a Mac, but why not run Linux on it? Then you'd get the best of both worlds.
> I couldn't open Notepad ... an error (0x803f8001) with Microsoft Store's licensing service stopped me I wonder if it works at all with no online connection to that store.
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Reminds me of this MacOS problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959
> I'm still a Windows guy, and I always will be. And this is exactly why Microsoft can get away with a buggy mess of a user hostile operating system. They only have an incentive to make a good OS if people are willing to leave when it’s a bad one.
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"I'm still a _______ guy, and I always will be." No matter what trademark you put in the blank, this is not a healthy thing to say.
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exactly, he's part of a problem
We Mourn Our Craft (nolanlawson.com)
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> They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months. You can use AI to write all your code, but if you want to be a programmer and can't see that the code is pretty mid then you should work on improving your own programming skills. People have been saying the 6 month thing for years now, and while I do see it improving in breadth, quality/depth still appears to be plateauing. It's okay if you don't want to be a programmer though, you can be a manager and let AI do an okay job at being your programmer. You better be driven to be a good at manager though. If you're not... then AI can do an okay job of replacing you there too.
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I didn't come in IT for money - back in the days it wasn't as well paid as today - nevertheless if this craft was very poorly paid I probably wouldn't choose this profession either. And I assume many people here wouldn't as well unless you are already semi-retired or debt free. I mourn a little bit that in 20 years possibly 50% of software jobs will get axed or unless you are elite/celebrity dev salary will stagnate. I mourn that in the future upward mobility and moving up into upper middle class will be harder without trying to be entrepreneur.
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> because they’re wearing bazooka-powered jetpacks and you’re still riding around on a fixie bike Sure, maybe it takes me a little while to ride across town on my bike, but I can reliably get there and I understand every aspect of the road to my destination. The bazooka-powered jetpack might get me there in seconds, but it also might fly me across state lines, or to Antarctica, or the moon first, belching out clouds of toxic gas along the way.
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My ability to ask questions & hone in on good answers is far better than it ever was. My ability to change course & iterate is far faster than it ever has been. I'm making far more informed decisions, far more able to make forays and see how things turn out, with low cost. I could not be having a better time. I liked coding! It was fun! But I mourned because I felt like I would never get out 1% of the ideas in my head. I was too slow, and working on shit in my free time just takes so much, is so hard, when there's so little fruitful reward at the end of a weekend. But I can make incredible systems so fast. This is the craft I wanted to be doing. I feel incredibly relieved, feel such enormous weigh lifted, that maybe perhaps some of my little Inland Empire that lives purely in my head might perhaps make it's way to the rest of the world, possibly. Huge respect for all the sadness and mourning. Yes too to that. But I cannot begin to state how burdened and sad I felt, so unable to get the work done, and it's a total flip, with incredible raw excitement and possibility before me. That said, software used to reward such obsessive deep following pursuit, such leaning into problems. And I am very worried, long term, what happens to the incredible culture of incredible people working really hard together to build amazing systems.
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> "I didn’t ask for a robot to consume every blog post and piece of code I ever wrote and parrot it back so that some hack could make money off of it." I have to say this reads a bit hollow to me, and perhaps a little bit shallow. If the content this guy created could be scraped and usefully regurgitated by an LLM, that same hack, before LLMs, could have simply searched, found the content and still profited off of it nonetheless. And probably could have done so without much more thought than that required to use the LLM. The only real difference introduced by the LLM is that the purpose of the scraping is different than that done by a search engine. But let's get rid of the loaded term "hack" and be a little less emotional and the complaint. Really the author had published some works and presumably did so that people could consume that content: without first knowing who was going to consume it and for what purpose. It seems to me what the author is really complaining about is that the reward from the consuming party has been displaced from himself to whoever owns the LLM. The outcome of consumption and use hasn't changed... only who got credit for the original work has. Now I'm not suggesting that this is an invalid complaint, but trying to avoid saying, "I posted this for my benefit"... be that commercial (ads?) or even just for public recognition...is a bit disingenuous. If you poured you knowledge, experience, and creativity into some content for others to consume and someone else took that content as their own... just be forthright about what you really lost and don't disparage the consumer. Just because they aren't your "hacks" anymore, but that middlemen are now reaping your rewards.
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From a blog post last month by the same author: > Today, I would say that about 90% of my code is authored by Claude Code. The rest of the time, I’m mostly touching up its work or doing routine tasks that it’s slow at, like refactoring or renaming. > I see a lot of my fellow developers burying their heads in the sand, refusing to acknowledge the truth in front of their eyes, and it breaks my heart because a lot of us are scared, confused, or uncertain, and not enough of us are talking honestly about it. Maybe it’s because the initial tribal battle lines have clouded everybody’s judgment, or maybe it’s because we inhabit different worlds where the technology is either better or worse (I still don’t think LLMs are great at UI for example), but there’s just a lot of patently unhelpful discourse out there, and I’m tired of it. https://nolanlawson.com/2026/01/24/ai-tribalism/ If you're responding to this with angry anti-AI rants (or wild AI hype), might want to go read that post.
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This discussion is like the discourse about work from home/return to office.
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For many (most) people, it was never a "craft," it was a job where with the appropriate skills you could make a ton of money. That's possibly, maybe, maybe not ending, we will see. It is still possible to treat coding as a craft. There are tons of open source projects that would love to have your help, but the days of making big money may be drawing to a close. Also, don't forget the things that AI makes possible. It's a small accomplishment, but I have a World of Warcraft AddOn that I haven't touched in more than 10 years. Of course now, it is utterly broken. I pointed ChatGPT at my old code and asked it to update it to "retail" WoW, and it did it. And it actually worked. That's kind of amazing.
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The majority of the code currently running in production for my company was written 5+ years ago. This was all "hand-written" and much lower quality than the AI generated code that I am generating and deploying these days. Yet I feel much more connected with my old code. I really enjoyed actually writing all that code even though it wasn't the best. If AI tools had existing 5 years ago when I first started working on this codebase, obviously the code quality would've been much higher. However, I feel like I really loved writing my old code and if given the same opportunity to start over, I would want to rewrite this code myself all over again.
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This entire panic is a mass-hysteria event. The hallucination that "an LLM can do software engineering better than a 10x engineer" is only possible because there are so few 10xers left in the business. 99% either retired or are otherwise not working at the moment. The "difficult", "opinionated", "overpaid" maniacs are virtually all gone. That's why such a reckless and delusional idea like "we'll just have agents plan, coordinate, and build complete applications and systems" is able to propagate. The adults were escorted out of the building. Managements' hatred of real craftspeople is manifesting in the most delusional way yet. And this time, they're actually going to destroy their businesses. I'm here for it. They're begging to get their market share eaten for breakfast.
Some years ago I was at the Burger King near the cable car turntable at Powell and Market St in San Francisco. Some of the homeless people were talking about the days when they'd been printers. Press operators or Linotype operators. Jobs that had been secure for a century were just - gone. That's the future for maybe half of programmers. Remember, it's only been three years since ChatGPT. This is just getting started.
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From valued professional to surplus inventory just like that. Where does this process end? Because right now it's only accelerating.
> wait six months. I mourn having to repeatedly hear this never-quite-true promise that an amazing future of perfect code from agentic whatevers will come to fruition, and it's still just six months away. "Oh yes, we know we said it was coming six, twelve, and eighteen months ago, but this time we pinky swear it's just six months away!" I remember when I first got access to the internet. It was revolutionary. I wanted to be online all the time, playing games, chatting with friends, and discovering new things. It shaped my desire to study computer science and learn to develop software! I could see and experience the value of the internet immediately. It's utility was never "six months away," and I didn't have to be compelled to use it—I was eager to use it of my own volition as often as possible. LLM coding doesn't feel revolutionary or exciting like this. It's a mandate from the top. It's my know-nothing boss telling me to "find ways to use AI so we can move faster." It's my boss's know-nothing boss conducting Culture Amp surveys about AI usage, but ignoring the feedback that 95% of Copilot's PR comments are useless noise: "The name of this unit test could be improved." It's waiting for code to be slopped onto my screen, so I can go over it with a fine-toothed comb and find all the bugs—and there are always bugs. Here's what I hope is six months away: The death of AI hype.
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> LLM coding doesn't feel revolutionary or exciting like this. Maybe you’re just older.
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If you've only experienced MS Copilot I invite you to try the latest models through Codex (free deals ongoing), Claude Code, or Opencode. You may be surprised, for better or worse. What kind of software do you do?
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>It's utility was never "six months away," 6 months ago is when my coding became 100% done by AI. The utility already has been there for a while. >I didn't have to be compelled to use it—I was eager to use it of my own volition as often as possible. The difference is that you were a kid then with an open mind and now your world view has fixed into a certain way the world works and how things should be done.
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This feels right when you're looking forwards. The perfect AI bot is definitely not 6 months away. It'll take a lot longer than that to get something that doesn't get things wrong a lot of the time. That's not especially interesting or challenging though. It's obvious. What's much more interesting is looking back 6, 12, 18, or 24 months. 6 months ago was ChatGPT 5, 12 months ago was GPT 4.5, 18 months ago was 4o, and 24 months ago ChatGPT 3.5 was released (the first one). If you've been following closely you'll have seen incredible changes between each of them. Not to get to perfect, because that's not really a reasonable goal, but definite big leaps forward each time. A couple of years ago one-shotting a basic tic tac toe wasn't really possible. Now though, you can one-shot a fairly complex web app. It won't be perfect, or even good by a lot of measures compared to human written software, but it will work. I think the comparison to the internet is a good one. I wrote my first website in 1997, and saw the rapid iteration of websites and browsers back then. It felt amazing, and fast . AI feels the same to me. But given the fact that browsers still aren't good in a lot of ways I think it's fair to say AI will take a similarly long time. That doesn't mean the innovations along the way aren't freaking cool though.
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Yeah, but humans still had to work to create those websites, it increased jobs, didn't replace them (this is happening). This will devalue all labor that has anything to do with i/o on computers, if not outright replace a lot of it. Who cares if it can't write perfect code, the owners of the software companies never cared about good code, they care about making money. They make plenty of money off slop, and they'll make even more if they don't have to have humans create the slop. The job market will get flooded with the unemployed (it already is) with fewer jobs to replace the ones that were automated, those remaining jobs will get reduced to minimum wages whenever and wherever possible. 25% of new college grads cannot find employment. Soon young people will be so poor that you'll beg to fight in a war. Give it 5-10 years. This isn't a hard future to game theory out, its not pretty if we maintain this fast track of progress in ML that minimally requires humans. Notice how the ruling class has increased the salaries for certain types of ML engineers, they know what's at stake. These businessmen make decisions based on expected value calculated from complex models, they aren't giving billion dollar pay packages to engineers because its trendy. We should use our own mental models to predict where this is going, and prevent it from happening however possible. THE word ''Luddite'' continues to be applied with contempt to anyone with doubts about technology, especially the nuclear kind. Luddites today are no longer faced with human factory owners and vulnerable machines. As well-known President and unintentional Luddite D. D. Eisenhower prophesied when he left office, there is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO's, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed, although Ike didn't put it quite that way. We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on, even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool any of the people any of the time. If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come - you heard it here first - when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long. Meantime, as Americans, we can take comfort, however minimal and cold, from Lord Byron's mischievously improvised song, in which he, like other observers of the time, saw clear identification between the first Luddites and our own revolutionary origins. It begins: [0] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html
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ChatGPT 3.5 was almost 40 months ago, not 24. GPT 4.5 was supposed to be 5 but was not noticeably better than 4o. GPT 5 was a flop. Remember the hype around Gemini 3? What happened to that? Go back and read the blog posts from November when Opus 4.5 came out; even the biggest boosters weren't hyping it up as much as they are now. It's pretty obvious the change of pace is slowing down and there isn't a lot of evidence that shipping a better harness and post-training on using said harness is going to get us to the magical place where all SWE is automated that all these CEOs have promised.
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> an amazing future of perfect code from agentic whatevers will come to fruition... Nobody credible is promising you a perfect future. But, a better future, yes! If you do not see it, then know this. You have your head firmly planted in the sand and are intentionally refusing to see what is coming. You may not like it. You may not want it. But it is coming and you will either have to adapt or become irrelevant. Does Copilot spit out useless PR comments. 100% yes! Are there tools that are better than Copilot? 100% yes! These tools are not perfect. But even with their imperfections, they are very useful. You have to learn to harness them for their strengths and build processes to address their weaknesses. And yes, all of this requires learning and experimentation. Without that, you will not get good results and you will complain about these tools not being good.
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The state of the art is moving so rapidly that, yeah, Copilot by Microsoft using gpt-5-mini:low is not going to be very good. And there are many places where AI has been implemented poorly, generally by people who have the distribution to force it upon many people. There are also plenty of people who use vibe coding tools and produce utterly atrocious codebases. That doesn't preclude the existence of effective AI tools, and people who are good at using them.
To the people who are against AI programming, honest question: why do you not program in assembly? Can you really say "you" "programmed" anything at all if a compiler wrote your binaries? This is a 100% honest question. Because whatever your justification to this is, it can probably be used for AI programmers using temperature 0.0 as well, just one abstraction level higher. I'm 100% honestly looking forward to finding a single justification that would not fit both scenarios.
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I know how to review code without looking at the corresponding assembly and have high confidence in the behavior of the final binary. I can't quite say the same for a prompt without looking at the generated code, even with temperature 0. The difference is not determinism, it is explainability.
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A chef can cook a steak better than a robo-jet-toaster, even though neither of them has raised the cow. It's not about having abstraction levels above or below (BTW, in 21st century CPUs, the machine code itself is an abstraction over much more complex CPU internals). It's about writing a more correct, efficient, elegant, and maintainable code at whichever abstraction layer you choose. AI still writes messier, sloppier, buggier, more redundant code than a good programmer can when they care about the craft of writing code. The end result is worse to those who care about the quality of code. We mourn, because the quality we paid so much attention to is becoming unimportant compared to the sheer quantity of throwaway code that can be AI-generated. We're fine dining chefs losing to factory-produced junk food.
Compilers are deterministic.
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There is no requirement for compilers to be deterministic. The requirement is that a compiler produces something that is valid interpretation of the program according to the language specification, but unspecified details (like specific ordering of instructions in the resulting code) could in principle be chosen nondeterministically and be different in separate executions of the compiler.
I just answered exactly that. I think that AI agents code better than humans and are the future. But the parent argument is pretty bad, in my opinion.
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Depends on who these humans you're comparing AI code to. I've seen and reviewed enough AI code in the last few months to have formed a solid impression that it's "ok" at best and relies heavily on who guides it - how well spec defined, what kind of rules are set, coding styles, architecture patterns.
If you're programming for the art, you can continue. Someone who enjoys painting can do so even after the camera
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As you probably know, painting changed quite a bit after cameras became common. I wonder if handcrafted code will have a similar shift, becoming more "artistic" :)
There are many tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars being poured into the smartest minds in the world to push this thing forward I'm not so confident that it'll only be code monkeys for too long
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Until they can magically increase context length to such a size that can conveniently fit the whole codebase, we're safe. It seems like the billions so far mostly go to talk of LLMs replacing every office worker, rather than any action to that effect. LLMs still have major (and dangerous) limitations that make this unlikely.
I think there's clearly a difference in opinion based on what you work on. Some people were working on things that pre-CC models also couldn't handle and then CC could, and it changed their opinions quickly. I expect (but cannot prove of course) that the same will happen with the area you are describing. And then your opinion may change.
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I expect it to, eventually. But then the cutting edge will have simply moved to something else. I agree that it's very destabilizing. It's sort of like inflation for expertise. You spend all this time and effort saving up expertise, and then those savings rapidly lose value. At the same time, your ability to acquire new expertise has accelerated (because LLMs are often excellent private tutors), which is analogous to an inflation-adjusted wage increase. There are a ton of variables. Will hallucinations ever become negligible? My money is on "no" as long as the architecture is basically just transformers. How will compiling training data evolve with time? My money is on "it will get more expensive". How will legislators react? I sure hope not by suppressing competition. As long as markets and VC are functioning properly, it should only become easier to become a founder, so outsized corporate profits will be harder to lock down.
I hope that "our craft" which now produces, largely, vulnerable buggy bloatware actually dies. Perhaps people or machines will finally figure out how to make software which actually works without a need to weekly patching
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Something tells me a non-deterministic code generator won't be the solution to this problem.
That is my experience from a year ago but I no longer feel that way. I write a few instructions, guide an agent to create a plan, and rarely touch the code myself. If I don’t like something, I ask the agent to fix it.
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Agree, there was a huge step change with Claude Code + Opus 4.5 (maybe 4.6 is even better?). Anyone dealing with earlier models as their basis should probably try the newest stuff and see if it changes their minds.
> They can write code better than you or I can, and if you don’t believe me, wait six months. No they cannot, And an AI bro squeezing every talking point into a think piece while pretending to have empathy doesn't change that. You just want an exit, and you want it fast.
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Also: > and if you don’t believe me, wait six months This reads as a joke nowadays.
This perspective was mine 6 months ago. And god damn, I do miss the feeling of crafting something truly beautiful in code sometimes. But then, as I've been pushed into this new world we're living in, I've come to realize a couple things: Nothing I've ever built has lasted more than a few years. Either the company went under, or I left and someone else showed up and rewrote it to suit their ideals. Most of us are doing sand art. The tide comes in and its gone. Code in and of itself should never have been the goal. I realized that I was thinking of the things I build and the problems I selected to work on from the angle of code quality nearly always. Code quality is important! But so is solving actual problems with it. I personally realized that I was motivated more by the shape of the code I was writing than the actual problems it was written to solve. Basically the entire way I think about things has changed now. I'm building systems to build systems. Thats really fun. Do I sometimes miss the feeling of looking at a piece of code and feeling a sense of satisfaction of how well made it is? Sure. That era of software is done now sadly. We've exited the craftsman era and entered into the Ikea era of software development.
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> Nothing I've ever built has lasted more than a few years. maybe this say something more about your career decisions than anything else?
There's a commercial building under construction next to my office. I look down on the construction site, and those strapping young men are digging with their big excavators they've been using for years and taking away the dirt with truck and trailer. Why use a spade? Even those construction workers use the right sized tools. They ain't stupid.
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This is the right take IMO, so thanks for a balanced comment. I would add a nuance from OPs perspective sorta: a close friend of mine works in construction, and often comments on how projects can be different. On some, everyone in the entire building supply chain can be really inspired to work on a really interesting project because of either its usefulness or its craftsmanship (the 2 of which are related), and on some, everyone’s, just trying to finish the project is cheaply quickly as possible. It’s not that the latter hasn’t existed in tech, but it does appear that there is a way to use LLMs to do more of the latter. It’s not “the end of a craft”, but without a breakthrough (and something to check the profit incentive) it’s also not a path to utopia (like other comments seem to be implying) Craftsmanship doesn’t die, it evolves, but the space in between can be a bit exhausting as markets fail to understand the difference at first.
It really shouldn't be this hard to just provide one piece of evidence. Is anecdotes of toy internal greenfield projects that could probably be built with a drag and drop no-code editor really the best from this LLM revolution?
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What is your bar for “useful”? Let’s start there and we’ll see what evidence can be offered. User count? Domain? Scope of development? You have something in mind, obviously.
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If you're asking me to define a very clear bar, it's obvious nothing cleared it. Anything that proves that LLMs increase software quality. Any software built with an LLM that is actually in production, survives maintenance, doesn't have 100 CVEs, that people actually use.
It's not clear what evidence you expect to see? Every major tech company is using AI for a significant % of their code. Ask anyone that works there and you will have all the evidence you need.
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> Every major tech company is using AI for a significant % of their code It shows, increased outages, increased vulnerabilities, windows failing to boot, windows task bar is still react native and barely works. And I have spoken to engineers at FANG companies, they are forced to use LLMs, managers are literally tracking metrics. So where is all this amazing new software and software quality or increased productivity from them?
> Fully AI generated code has similar artifacts. You can spot them pretty easily after a bit. For now. Though I suspect the commit history would probably still be pretty telling.
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lol.. the AI actually writes detailed commit message. Unlike me... "Fixed issue with timeout"
This just in: people who expect things to stay the same should steer clear of careers in technology. Art, too, come to think of it.
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C came out in ~1972. Some people have been coding in C the entire time since then. There's no inherent reason that software hasn't stayed the same for a long time :).
I don’t think it’s that simple. A couple of examples: Food: A lot of the processed foods that are easily available make us unhealthy and sick. Even vegetables are less nutritious than they were 50 years ago. Mass agriculture also has many environmental externalities. Consumer goods: It has become difficult to find things like reliable appliances. I bought a chest freezer. It broke after a year. The repairman said it would cost more to fix than to buy a new one. I asked him if there was a more reliable model and he said no: they all break quickly. Clothing: Fast fashion is terrible for the environment. Do we need as many clothes as we have? How quickly do they end up in landfills? Would we be better off as a society repairing shoes instead of buying new ones every year?
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It's true, they don't "make 'em like they used to". They make them in new, more efficient ways which have contributed to improving global trends in metrics such as literacy, child mortality, life expectancy, extreme poverty, and food supply. If you are arguing that standard of living today is lower than in the past, I think that is a very steep uphill battle to argue If your worries are about ecology and sustainability I agree that is a concern we need to address more effectively than we have in the past. Technology will almost certainly be part of that solution via things like fusion energy. Success is not assured and we cannot just sit back and say "we live in the best of all possible worlds with a glorious manifest destiny", but I don't think that the future is particularly bleak compared to the past
People have to stop talking like LLMs solved programming. If you're someone with a background in Computer Science, you should know that we have formal languages for a reason, and that natural language is not as precise as a programming language. But anyway we're peek AI hype, hitting the top on HN is worth more than a reasonable take, reasonableness doesn't sell after all. So here we're seeing yet another text about how the world of software was solved by AI and being a developer is an artifact of the past.
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This is in my opinion the greatest weakness of everything LLM related. If I care about the application I'm writing, and I believe I should if I bother doing it at all, it seems to me that I should want to be precise and concise at describing it. In a way, the code itself serves as a verification mechanism for my thoughts and whether I understand the domain sufficiently. English or any other natural language can of course be concise enough, but when being brief they leave much to imagination. Adding verbosity allows for greater precision, but I think as well that that is what formal languages are for, just as you said. Although, I think it's worth contemplating whether the modern programming languages/environments have been insufficient in other ways. Whether by being too verbose at times, whether the IDEs should be more like databases first and language parsers second, whether we could add recommendations using far simpler, but more strict patterns given a strongly typed language. My current gripes are having auto imports STILL not working properly in most popular IDEs or an IDE not finding referenced entity from a file, if it's not currently open... LLMs sometimes help with that, but they are extremely slow in comparison to local cache resolution. Long term I think more value will be in directly improving the above, but we shall see. AI will stay around too of course, but how much relevance it'll have in 10 years time is anybody's guess. I think it'll become a commodity, the bubble will burst and we'll only use it when sensible after a while. At least until the next generation of AI architecture will arrive.
You're right, of course, but you should consider that all formal language starts as an informal language idea in the mind of someone. Why shouldn't that "mind" be an LLM vs. a human?
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I think mostly because an LLM is not a "mind". I'm sure there'll be an algorithm that could be considered a "mind" in the future, but present day an LLM is not it. Not yet.
I started programming over 40 years ago because it felt like computers were magic. They feel more magic today than ever before. We're literally living in the 1980s fantasy where you could talk to your computer and it had a personality. I can't believe it's actually happening, and I've never had more fun computing. I can't empathize with the complaint that we've "lost something" at all. We're on the precipice of something incredible. That's not to say there aren't downsides (WOPR almost killed everyone after all), but we're definitely in a golden age of computing.
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I really am very thankful for @simonw posting a TikTok from Chris Ashworth, a Baltimore theater software developer, who recently picked up LLM's for building a voxel display software controller. And who was just blown away. https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jan/30/a-programming-tool-for-the-arts/ Simon doesn't touch on my favorite part of Chris's video though, which is Chris citing his friend Jesse Kriss. This stuck out at me so hard, and is so close to what you are talking about: > The interesting thing about this is that it's not taking away something that was human and making it a robot. We've been forced to talk to computers in computer language. And this is turning that around. I don't see (as you say) a personality. But I do see the ability to talk. The esoteria is still here underneath, but computer programmers having this lock on the thing that has eaten the world, being the only machine whisperers around, is over. That depth of knowledge is still there and not going away! But notably too, the LLM will help you wade in, help those not of the esoteric personhood of programmers to dive in & explore.
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The golden age for me is any period where you have the fully documented systems. Hardware that ships with documentation about what instructions it supports. With example code. Like my 8-bit micros did. And software that’s open and can be modified. Instead what we have is: - AI which are little black boxes and beyond our ability to fully reason. - perpetual subscription services for the same software we used to “own”. - hardware that is completely undocumented to all but a small few who are granted an NDA before hand - operating systems that are trying harder and harder to prevent us from running any software they haven’t approved because “security” - and distributed systems become centralised, such as GitHub, CloudFlare, AWS, and so on and so forth. The only thing special about right now is that we have added yet another abstraction on top of an already overly complex software stack to allow us to use natural language as pseudocode. And that is a version special breakthrough, but it’s not enough by itself to overlook all the other problems with modern computing.
Anybody who says this kind of thing, I assume you weren't very good at programming, you ultimately didn't like doing it and so you probably climbed the business ladder. I can't say for sure but I'd bet you're upper management and therefor this is magic to you, its a threat to all of us. You probably despised writing code because you weren't good at it so you welcome these tools to patch that insecurity of yours.
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If you were confident in your own skills, you wouldn’t need to invent a whole backstory just to discredit someone.
I'm actually extremely good at programming. My point is I love computers and computing . You can use technology to achieve amazing things (even having fun). Now I can do much more of that than when I was limited to what I can personally code. In the end, it's what computers can do that's amazing, beautiful, terrifying... That thrill and to be on the bleeding edge is always what I was after.
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Its going to strip all value from labor you idiot, you won't be able to afford to create anything unless you can afford some billionaire's thinking machine. I guess for people like you that had 40 years to save up SWE salaries that's fine, you're a class traitor. Stop cheering on the destruction of human agency, and labor. Typical boomers think the world is perfect because they have everything they need, without any care for the next generation. Thinking, oh they'll figure it out. Guess what we're not. The world is going to shit because of attitudes like this, you'll leave us with nothing.
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Thank you. I don't understand how people don't see that this is the universe's most perfect gift to corporations, and what a disaster it is for labor. There won't be a middle class. Future generations will be intellectual invalids. Baffling to see people celebrating.
> We're on the precipice of something incredible. Total dependence on a service?
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prefrontal cortex as a service
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Yes this is the issue. We truly have something incredible now. Something that could benefit all of humanity. Unfortunately it comes at $200/month from Sam Altman & co.
I think you're underestimating what AI can do in the coding space. It is an extreme paradigm shift. It's not like "we wrote C, but now we switch to C++, so now we think in objects and templates". It's closer to the shift from assembly to a higher level language. Your goal is still the same. But suddenly you're working in a completely newer level of abstraction where a lot of the manual work that used to be your main concern is suddenly automated away. If you never tried Claude Code, give it s try. It's very easy to get I to. And you'll soon see how powerful it is.
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> But suddenly you're working in a completely newer level of abstraction where a lot of the manual work that used to be your main concern is suddenly automated away. It's remarkable that people who think like this don't have the foresight to see that this technology is not a higher level of abstraction, but a replacement of human intellect. You may be working with it today, but whatever you're doing will eventually be done better by the same technology. This is just a transition period. Assuming, of course, that the people producing these tools can actually deliver what they're selling, which is very much uncertain. It doesn't change their end goal, however.
I do not mourn. For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things. When I was a child, I found a cracked version of Photoshop and made images which seemed like magic. When I was in college, I learned to make websites through careful, painstaking effort. When I was a young professional, I used those skills and others to make websites for hospitals and summer camps and conferences. Then I learned software development and practiced the slow, methodical process of writing and debugging software. Now, I get to make beautiful things by speaking, guiding, and directing a system which is capable of handling the drudgery while I think about how to make the system wonderful and functional and beautiful. It was, for me, never about the code. It was always about making something useful for myself and others. And that has never been easier.
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If AI can do the coding, those of us who aren't programmers don't need you anymore. We can just tell the AI what we want. Luckily for real programmers, AI's not actually very good at generating quality code. It generates the equivalent of Ali Baba code: it lasts for one week and then breaks. This is going to be the future of programming: low-paid AI clerks to generate the initial software, and then the highly paid programmers who fix all the broken parts.
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> For my whole life I’ve been trying to make things—beautiful elegant things. Why did you stop? Because, you realize, LLMs are giving up the act of creating for the immediacy of having. It's hiring someone to make for you. Things are more convenient if you live the dream of the LLM, and hire a taskrabbit to run your wood shop. But it's not you that's making.
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So many people responding to you with snarky comments or questioning your programming ability. It makes me sad. You shared a personal take (in response to TFA which was also a personal take). There is so much hostility and pessimism directed at engineers who simply say that AI makes them more productive and allows them to accomplish their goals faster. To the skeptics: by all means, don't use AI if you don't want to; it's your choice, your career, your life. But I am not sure that hitching your identity to hating AI is altogether a good idea. It will make you increasingly bitter as these tools improve further and our industry and the wider world slowly shifts to incorporate them. Frankly, I consider the mourning of The Craft of Software to be just a little myopic. If there are things to worry about with AI they are bigger things, like widespread shifts in the labor force and economic disruption 10 or 20 years from now, or even the consequences of the current investment bubble popping. And there are bigger potential gains in view as well. I want AI to help us advance the frontiers of science and help us get to cures for more diseases and ameliorate human suffering. If a particular way of working in a particular late-20th and early-21st century profession that I happen to be in goes away but we get to those things, so be it. I enjoy coding. I still do it without AI sometimes. It's a pleasant activity to be good at. But I don't kid myself that my feelings about it are all that important in the grand scheme of things.
In my opinion the relationship between level of detailed care and resulting beauty is proportional. Can you get the same level without getting your hands dirty? Sure, maybe, but I doubt a painter or novelist could really produce beautiful work without being intimately familiar with that work. The distance that heavy use of AI tools creates between you and the output does not really lend itself to beauty. Could you do it, sure, but at that point it's probably more efficient to just do things yourself and have complete intimate control. To me, you sound more utilitarian. The philosophy you are presenting is a kind of Ikea philosophy. Utility, mass production, and unique beauty are generally properties that do not cohere together, and there's a reason for this. I think the use of LLMs in the production of digital goods is very close to the use of automation lines in the production of physical goods. No matter how you try some of the human charm, and thus beauty will inevitably be lost, the number of goods will increase, but they'll all be barely differentiable souless replications of more or less the same shallow ideas repeated as infinitum.
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only the true artist will survive the advent of LLMs
I like coding, I really do. But like you, I like building things more than I like the way I build them. I do not find myself miss writing code by hand as much. I do find it that the developers that focused on "build the right things" mourn less than those who focused on "build things right". But I do worry. The main question is this - will there be a day that AI will know what are "the right things to build" and have the "agency" (or illusion of) to do it better than an AI+human (assuming AI will get faster to the "build things right" phase, which is not there yet) My main hope is this - AI can beat a human in chess for a while now, we still play chess, people earn money from playing chess, teaching chess, chess players are still celebrated, youtube influencers still get monetized for analyzing games of celebrity chess players, even though the top human chess player will likely lose to a stockfish engine running on my iPhone. So maybe there is hope.
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> will there be a day that AI will know what are "the right things to build" and have the "agency" (or illusion of) to do it better than an AI+human (assuming AI will get faster to the "build things right" phase, which is not there yet) Of course, and if LLMs keep improving at current rates it will happen much faster than people think. Arguably you don't need junior software engineers anymore. When you also don't need senior software engineers anymore it isn't that much of a jump to not needing project managers, managers in general or even software companies at all anymore. Most people, in order to protect their own ego, will assume *their* job is safe until the job one rung down from them disappears and then the justified worrying will begin. People on the "right things to build" track love to point out how bad people are at describing requirements, so assume their job as a subject matter expert and/or customer-facing liaison will be safe, but does it matter how bad people are at describing requirements if iteration is lightning fast with the human element removed? Yes, maybe someone who needs software and who isn't historically some sort of software designer is going to have to prompt the LLM 250 times to reach what they really want, but that'll eventually still be faster than involving any humans in a single meeting or phone call. And a lot of people just won't really need software as we currently think about it at all, they'll just be passing one-off tasks to the AI. The real question is what happens when the labor market for non-physical work completely implodes as AI eats it all. Based on current trends I'm going to predict in terms of economics and politics we handle it as poorly as possible leading to violent revolution and possible societal collapse, but I'd love to be wrong.
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> "build the right things" [vs] "build things right" I think this (frequent) comparison is incorrect. There are times when quality doesn't matter and times that it does. Without that context these discussions are meaningless . If I build my own table no one really gives a shit about the quality besides me and maybe my friends judging me. But if I sell it, well then people certainly care[0] and they have every right to. If I build my own deck at my house people do also care and there's a reason I need to get permits for this, because the danger it can cause to others. It's not a crazy thing to get your deck inspected and that's really all there is to it. So I don't get these conversations because people are just talking past one another. Look, no one gives a fuck if you poorly vibe code your personal website, or at least it is gonna be the same level as building your own table. But if Ikea starts shipping tables with missing legs (even if it is just 1%) then I sure give a fuck and all the customers have a right to be upset. I really think a major part of this concern with vibe coding is about something bigger. It is about slop in general. In the software industry we've been getting sloppier and sloppier and LLMs significantly amplify that. It really doesn't matter if you can vibe code something with no mistakes, what matters is what the businesses do. Let's be honest, they're rushing and don't care about quality because they have markets cornered and consumers are unable to accurately evaluate products prior to purchase . That's the textbook conditions for a lemon market. I mean the companies outsource tech support so you call and someone picks up who's accent makes you suspicious of their real name being "Steve". After all, it is the fourth "Steve" you've talked to as you get passed around from support person to support person. The same companies who contract out coders from poor countries and where you find random comments in another language. That's the way things have been going. More vaporware. More half baked products. So yeah, when you have no cake the half baked cake is probably better than nothing. At home it also doesn't matter if you're eating a half baked cake or one that competes with the best bakers in the world. But for everyday people who can't bake their own cakes, what do they do? All they see is a box with a cake in it, one is $1, another for $10, and another other is $100. They look the same but they can't know until they take a bite. You try enough of the $1 cakes and by the time you give up the $10 cakes are all gone. By the time you get so frustrated you'll buy the $100 cake they're gone too. I don't dislike vibe coding because it is "building things the wrong way" or any of that pretentious notion. I, and I believe most people with a similar opinion, care because "the right things" aren't being built . Most people don't care how things were built, but they sure do care about the result. Really people only start caring about how the sausage is made when they find out that something distasteful is being served and concealed from them. It's why everyone is saying "slop". So when people make this false dichotomy it just feels like people aren't listing to what's actually being said. [0] Mind you, it is much easier for an inexperienced person to judge the quality of a table than software. You don't need to be a carpenter to know a table's leg is missing or that it is wobbly but that doesn't always hold true for more sophisticated things like software or even cars. If you haven't guessed already, I'm referencing lemon markets: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
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Computers are better at chess. Humans invented chess and enjoy it. I think humans have the advantage.
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> will there be a day that AI will know what are "the right things to build" and have the "agency" (or illusion of) to do it better than an AI+human I share this sentiment. It's really cool that these systems can do 80% of the work. But given what this 80% entails, I don't see a moat around that remaining 20%.
Would you consider drudgery the in-depth thinking that's required to actually go and write that algorithm, think out all the data ownership relationships, name the variables, think the edge cases for the tests? For me, the act of sitting down and writing the code is what actually leads to true understanding of the logic, in a similar way to how the only way to understand a mathematical proof is to go trough it. Sure, I'm not doing anything useful by showing that the root of 2 is irrational, but by doing that I gain insights that are otherwise impossible to transfer between two minds. I believe that coding was one of the few things (among, for example, writing math proofs, or that weird process of crafting something with your hands where the object you are building becomes intimately evident) that get our brains to a higher level of abstraction than normal mammal "survival" thinking. And it makes me very sad to see it thrown out of the window in the name of a productivity that may not even be real.
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> Would you consider drudgery the in-depth thinking that's required to actually go and write that algorithm, think out all the data ownership relationships, name the variables, think the edge cases for the tests? For 99% of the functions I've written in my life? Absolutely drudgery. They're barely algorithms. Just bog-standard data transformation. This is what I love having AI replace. For the other 1% that actually requires original thought, truly clever optimization, and smart naming to make it literate? Yes, I'll still be doing that by hand, although I'll probably be getting the LLM to help scaffold all the unit tests and check for any subtle bugs or edge cases I may have missed. The point is, LLMs let me spend more time at the higher level of abstraction that is more productive. It's not taking it away!
>It was, for me, never about the code. Then it wasn't your craft.
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so much garbage ego in statements like this. if you really knew about software, you'd recognize there are about a million ways to be successful in this field
That's just gatekeeping. It was and is my craft. I've been doing it since grade 5. Like 30 years now. Writing tight assembly for robot controllers all the way to AI on MRI machines to security for the DoD and now the biggest AI on the planet. But my craft was not typing. It's coding. If you're typist you're going to mourn the printer. But if you're a writer you're going to see how the improves your life.
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A big component to coding is typing. If you aren't doing the typing, then, unless you are dictating code to someone else to mechanically, verbatim type out for you, you are not coding. I do believe directing an LLM to write code, and then reviewing and refining that code with the LLM, is a skill that has value -- a ton of value! -- but I do not think it is coding. It's more like super-technical product management, or like a tech lead pair programming with a junior, but in a sort of mentorship way where they direct and nudge the junior and stay as hands-off as possible. It's not coding, and once that's the sum total of what you do, you are no longer a coder. You can get defensive and call this gatekeeping, but I think it's just the new reality. There's no shame in admitting that you've moved to a stage of your life where you build software but your role in it isn't as a coder anymore. Just as there's no shame in moving into management, if that's what you enjoy and are effective at it. (If presenting credentials is important to you, as you've done, I've been doing this since 1989, when I was 8 years old. I've gone down to embedded devices, up through desktop software, up to large distributed systems. Coding is my passion, and has been for most of my life.)
Isn't this like saying that if better woodworking tools come out, and you like woodworking, that woodworking somehow 'isn't your craft'. They said that their craft is about making things. There are woodworkers on YouTube who use CNC, some who use the best Festool stuff but nothing that moves on its own, and some who only use handtools. Where is the line at which woodworking is not their craft?
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I think a better comparison is painting and photography. Prior to the invention of photography, painting portraits of individuals and families was a real profession. Today it’s practically unheard of outside of heads of state and the like. Sure, there are plenty of people who could afford to commission a painted portrait but few do when a quick session in a photographer’s studio is so much cheaper and more convenient.
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The analogy you're making is that wiring a taskrabbit to assemble Ikea furniture is woodworking. There's a market for Ikea. It's put woodworkers out of business, effectively. The only woodworkers that make reasonable wages from their craft are influencers. Their money comes from YouTube ads. There's no shame in just wanting things without going to the effort of making them.
Yes, that was the reference! Possibly too obscure. I can't tell whether I'm being downvoted by optimists who missed the joke, or by pessimists who got it.
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Haha, I downvoted you from the first category (until I read this comment).
"Wait 6 months" has been the call for 3-4 years now. You can't eulogize a profession that hasn't been killed, that's just mean.
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Things have progressed much faster than even the most optimistic predictions, so every "wait 6 months" has come true. Just look at how the discourse has changed on HN. No-one is using the arguments from 6 months ago and any argument today will probably be equally moot in 6 months.
And yet.. my car was surrounded by 5 self-driving cars with no people in them on the way to work on Thursday.
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And your ability to go your own way is only temporary and due to inertia. Today, for a while, you can still buy a vehicle that requires a driver and doesn't look and perform exactly like every other waymo. But that's only because self driving cars are still new and incomplete. It's still the transition period. I already can't buy the car I want with a manual transmission. There are still a few cars that I could get with one, but the number is both already small and getting smaller every year. And none of those few are the one I want, even though it was available previously. I already can't buy any (new) car that doesn't have a permanent internet connection with data collection and remote control by people that don't own the car even though I pay full cash without even financing, let alone the particular one I want. (I can, for now, at least break the on board internet connection after I buy the car without disabling the whole car, but that is just a trivial software change away, in software I don't get to see or edit.) It's hardly unreasonable to suggest that in some time you won't be able to avoid having a car that drives itself, and even be legally compelled to let the car drive itself because you can't afford the insurance or legal risk or straight up fines. And forget customizing or personalizing. That's right out.
> Maybe it comes down to the definition of "toil". For sure. I idealize a future where people can spend more time doing things they want to do, whatever those avocations might be. Freedom from servitude. I guess some kind of Star Trek / The Culture hybrid dream. The world we have is so far from that imaginary ideal. Implicit in that ideal would be elimination of inequality, and I'm certain there are massive forces that would oppose that elimination.
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And not just the definition, but the assumption that a specific toil is necessarily universal. I've had more than one conversation that started with someone else saying "using the LLM saves me soooo much time typing, think of how much time typing you'd save by using an LLM". But when I examine my processes and where I'm spending my time, typing isn't even on my list, so this claim is talking right past me and I can't see it all. Even when I was a hunt-and-peck typer on the c64 I didn't consider the typing to be a/the major factor in how long something took to program so much so that I continued with two-finger typing until I was forced to take a touch-typing class in highschool (back when that was still a thing, and we split the exercises between typewriters and computers). "I'm able to put my shirt on so much faster with this shirt-buttoning machine, and I don't spend time tediously buttoning shirts and maybe having to rebutton when I misalign the buttons and buttonholes. You should get one to button your shirts, you're wasting time by not using a buttoning machine". "I wear t-shirts." (Obviously a contrived and simplistic example for fun)
This article isn't really about losing a job. Coding is a passion for some of us. It's similar to artists and diffusion, the only difference being that many people can appreciate human art - but who (outside of us) cares that a human wrote the code?
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Is coding a passion only because other people appreciate it? Is painting a passion because others appreciate it? No, it is a passion in itself. There will always be people appreciating coding by hand as a passion. My passions - drawing, writing, coding - are worthwhile in themselves, not because other people care about them. Almost noone does.
The people outside of us didn’t care about your beautiful code before. Now we can quickly build their boring applications and spend more time building beautiful things for our community’s sake. Yes, there are economic concerns, but as far as “craft” goes, nothing is stopping us from continuing to enjoy it.
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I'd add part of the craft is enjoying those minutiae, sharing lessons, and stories with others. The number of people you can do that with is going to dwindle (and has been for a long time from the tech sphere's coopting of all of it). That's part that I mourn.
I think this is really it. Being a musician was never a very reliable way to earn a living, but it was a passion. A genuine expression of talent and feeling through the instrument. And if you were good enough you could pay the bills doing work work for studios, commercials, movies, theater. If you were really good you could perform as a headliner. Now, AI can generate any kind of music anyone wants, eliminating almost all the anonymous studio, commercial, and soundtrack work. If you're really good you can still perform as a headliner, but (this is a guess) 80% of the work for musicians is just gone.
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> AI can generate any kind of music anyone wants It only sounds like music.
There's a subset of people whose identity is grounded in the fact that they put in the hard work to learn things that most people are unable or unwilling to do. It's a badge of honor, and they resent anyone taking "shortcuts" to achieve their level of output. Kind of reminds me of lawyers who get bent out of shape when they lose a case to a pro se party. All those years of law school and studying for the bar exam, only to be bested by someone who got by with copying sample briefs and skimming Westlaw headnotes at a public library. :)
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It's not that our identity is grounded in being competent, it's that we're tired of cleaning up messes left by people taking shortcuts.
>You get to think through a problem and figure out why decision A is better than B. Learning about various domains and solving difficult problems is in itself a reward. So just tell the LLM about what you're thinking about. Why do you need to type out a for loop for the millionth time?
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(a) it's relaxing and pleasing to do something like typing out a for loop. The repetition with minor variation stimulates our brains just the right amount. Same reason why people like activities like gardening, cooking, working on cars, Legos, and so on. (b) it allows you to have some time to think about what you're doing. The "easy" part of coding gives you a bit of breathing room to plan out the next "hard" section.
I Write Games in C (yes, C) (jonathanwhiting.com)
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(2016)
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C has very low entry level, providing that you have some knowledge about memory management. When, as a Java developer, I had to quickly deliver some exchange connector using given .h and .so, I chose C, because C++ had too high entry level. If C is a sharp knife, C++ is a rotating pell post full of sharp knives. You can cut yourself even if you think you're safe. But I find string management in C awful and would like to borrow it from C++. Only string management
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I always liked C. I enjoyed how brutal it is, except the preprocessor. This is why zig is a godsend. It is actually simpler than C while being more precise than C! For example zig can distinguish between a pointer to a single element vs a pointer to an array of unknown length. Where as in c abi, it is all T* When importing a c lib, you can make it more ergonomic to use than c itself. Being able to easily import c lib is especially important to game dev, as practically all so called c++ libs also export a c header as they know how important it is. https://github.com/zig-gamedev has a lot of repos of ziggified c libs used in games. As for the preprocessor, zig comptime is so much better. It’s just more zig that runs at compile time.
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> I like Go a lot. In many ways it is C revisited, taking into account what has be learnt in the long years since it was released. I would like to use it, but there are big roadblocks that prevent me. The stop-the-world garbage collection is a big pain for games, stopping the world is something you can't really afford to do. I'm no Go fan, to be clear, but GC isn't the problem with Go. It has a pretty decent GC with sub-millisecond pause times. People who complain about GC pauses while extolling the virtues of manual memory management are running on a set of prejudices from 1999 and are badly in need of a mental firmware update.
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Yeah I was a bit surprised by this too. I think the post was written around 10 years ago, when it still was a genuine problem in Go.
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Good eye. This is why HN titles have year tags. :-) Yeah, this is from 2016. I don't think choosing C over C++ was defensible even back then, but the critique of Go makes more sense now. https://web.archive.org/web/20160109171250/http://jonathanwhiting.com/writing/blog/games_in_c/
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Plenty of people cycle on a fixie too. So what? C, especially modern C, does provide metaprogramming and abstraction facilities. In practice, you can even get things like the "defer" construct from other languages: https://lwn.net/Articles/934679/ The question isn't "Can I write a game in C?". Yes, of course you can, and it's not even that painful. The question is "Why would you?", and then "Why would you brag about it?" > C++ covers my needs, but fails my wants badly. It is desperately complicated. Despite decent tooling it's easy to create insidious bugs. It is also slow to compile compared to C. It is high performance, and it offers features that C doesn't have; but features I don't want, and at a great complexity cost. C++ is, practically speaking, a superset of C. It being "complicated"? The "insidious bugs"? It being "slow to compile"? All self-inflicted problems. The author of this article can't even fall back on the "well, my team will use all the fancy features if I let them use C++ at all!" argument pro-C-over-C++ people often lean on: he's the sole author of his projects! If he doesn't want to do template metaprogramming, he... just doesn't want to do it. I don't read these sorts of article as technical position papers. People say, out loud, "I use C and not C++" to say something about themselves . ISTM that certain circles there's this perception that C is somehow more hardcore. Nah. Nobody's impressed by using it over a modern language. It really is like a fixie bicycle.
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"Practically speaking" means nothing. Use "from my confused point of view", instead.
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If GDB could switch its C codebase to compiling as C++ without major surgery, it's close enough.
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Yes, C. Like all id games up to... Doom 3, if I'm not mistaken? Only then they switched to C++. There's absolutely nothing impressive about this fact.
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Nobody claimed it was impressive. It’s a little unusual to use C instead of C++, but that’s about it.
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People did do that, 30 years ago. Then Watcom C/C++ made it quite easy to use C++ for game development on PCs, PlayStation 2 introduced support for C++, quickly followed up by XBox and Nintendo, and that was it.
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>I really dislike javascript, it is so loose that I marvel that people are able to write big chunks of software in it. I have no interest in trying. Because they use Typescript. >The stop-the-world garbage collection is a big pain for games There is a number of languages that allow manual memory management: Zig, Nim, Rust and few others
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I write all of my games in pure C++. C++ all the way. FMOD for the audio engine, Steam Audio or Atmoky TrueSpatial for HRTF/geometric occlusion, and Jolt Physics for, well, physics. I'm sure many might say I'm a bit insane to do that, but eh, I do it anyway because it's fun.
I write mostly like I would in C, but use C++ features as needed. It ends up looking similar to Rust if you squint. All these "I write games in C" people complain about C++ features, and then end up reimplementing virtual interfaces manually with struct headers or massive switch statements, just to feel better about themselves. Writing games in C is not harder, you just have to implement modern language features by hand. Complaining about a language having features you don't want is silly. C++ doesn't take longer to compile if you don't abuse templates.
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>Writing games in C is not harder, you just have to implement modern language features by hand. I feel like if you need to implement modern language features, you shouldn't be using C. The entire point of C is to not be modern.
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I feel like, for me, it’s that I am more familiar with writing in C and switching to C++ seems rather difficult. So, sure I am reimplementing features that already exist in anoter language, it just so happens in this case is C++. Why not use python if you want to avoid reimplementing the wheel as much as possible. And sure python is not suited for game development but I just wanted to make a point with it. I think in the end ising a language you are most familiar with results in the most amount of enjoyable coding.
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> Complaining about a language having features you don't want is silly. It might be silly if you're working on your own. Software that delivers a lot of value is usually developed and evolved not only by team, but by a team with changing members and changing leadership over the project's lifetime. The features used will be the union of all features used over the years, and while it's easy for team leads to allow the use of more features than their predecessors, it's quite hard to reduce them.
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I’ve seen this play out a lot. People say they “write games in C” and then quietly rebuild half of C++ anyway with vtables in structs or giant switch statements, just without the compiler helping. That’s fine if it makes you happier, but it’s not obviously simpler or safer. Also, C++ compile times are mostly a self-inflicted wound via templates and metaprogramming, not some inherent tax you pay for having virtual functions.
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Yeah, you could argue that choosing C is just choosing a particular subset of C++. The main difference from choosing a different subset, e.g. “Google C++” (i.e. writing C++ according to the Google style guide), is that the compiler enforces that you stick to the subset.
Literally thousands of games have been written in C, and all graphics APIs (OpenGL, Vulkan, DX) are C APIs, so it isn't weird at all. All major game engines are also written in C/C++.
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Khronos APIs are C, DirectX is C++ exposed via COM or WinRT, Metal is Objective-C with C++ for shaders and Swift bindings, on Nintendo and PlayStation depends on which console generation you talk about.
DirectX is C++ (technically a set of COM interfaces) and most game engines are also C++. Unlike, say, Linux programming where C is the standard, almost all games have been written exclusively in C++ for a long time now, probably three decades.
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There are a few exceptions though, like most mobile games, visual novels (many of which use Python of all languages, due to an excellent framework called ren'py), and of course games written using Unity or XNA, which use .NET languages. Also, three decades is going a bit too far back, I think. In the mid nineties, C was still king, with assembly still hanging on. C++ was just one of several promising candidates, with some brave souls even trying Java.
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In J2ME feature phones Java was all there was, and even today many indies do use it on casual titles on Android. Which is why after so much resistance not wanting to use the NDK for Vulkan, and keeping using OpenGL ES from those devs, Google is bringing WebGPU to Java and Kotlin devs on Android. Announced at last Vulkanised, there is already an alpha version available, and they should talk more about it on upcoming Vulkanised.
Rust can be up there with C depending on the project.
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Any language can be, depending on the project. Rust compile is slower than C, on more than average. That's it.
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is that a joke?
Come try Odin!
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+1 for Odin Did a bit of game dev in Odin last year and it was a wonderful experience. It's very much game dev oriented and comes batteries included with many useful libraries. And the built in vector stuff is very helpful there too.
>Death of flash >The library support for games[in Go] is quite poor, and though you can wrap C libs without much trouble, doing so adds a lot of busy work. I can't see when this was written, but it has to be around 2015. So, about 10 years ago. I wonder what his opinion is today.
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The first capture of the page on Internet Archive Wayback Machine is from January 9th, 2016. So it’s at least that old. Also here is a snapshot of the main page of his website from that time, which has screenshots of his games and thereby provides context into what kind of games he had made and published when the blog post was written. https://web.archive.org/web/20160110012902/http://jonathanwhiting.com/ This one looks like it’s 3d and has a pretty unique style: https://web.archive.org/web/20160112060328/http://jonathanwhiting.com/games/knossu/press.html
I totally resonate with the author of the post. My main requirement to enjoy a language deeply is often simplicity, so I love languages like, C, Golang, Odin and Zig. That said, I also acknowledge that often times I need to solve problems that can benefit from a language that embraces what I call necessary complexity, but do it in elegant ways. Whenever I need to prioritise code correctness, especially memory and concurrency safety, using a mostly functional pattern instead of OOP, but without going as extreme as say Haskell, I unquestionably choose Rust, my favourite complex language. I often work with network code that is highly concurrent, must be as correct as possible and benefits from good performance, so then again, Rust feels natural here. On the other hand, I love coding simple indie games and for that particular case, I like a simple and performant language using an imperative, non-OOP style. In my opinion C, and in particular Odin more recently are quite a good fit. If Jonathan happens to be reading this comment, since he mentioned Golang, I would suggest him Odin as perhaps the best of both worlds between C and Golang. It has all the simplicity of Golang, but without a garbage collector, plus it is quite easy to code a game using Raylib.
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The language is called Go, golang is the website domain.
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I know, but I often use Golang for two reasons: 1. avoids confusion, no matter how unlikely it is in a context like HN, and 2. search engine "findability".
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> 1. avoids confusion, no matter how unlikely it is in a context like HN Who would be confused by "Go", but not "Rust" and "Zig"? > 2. search engine "findability". What kind of search engine are you using in 2026 that capable of handling context?
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The use of "golang" for posts and comments is desirable IMHO because it greatly facilitates search, especially on sites such as HN that cover many languages.
SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes (xorvoid.com)
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> I wrote a fairly straight-forward and minimalist lexer and it took >150 lines of C code was it supposed to be "<150"?
I may be the author.. enjoy! It was an absolute blast making this!
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An interesting use case - for the compiler as-is or for the essentiall idea of barely-C - might be in bootstrapping chains, i.e. starting from tiny platform-specific binaries one could verify the disassembly of, and gradually building more complex tools, interpreters, and compiler, so that eventually you get to something like a version of GCC and can then build an entire OS distribution. Examples: https://github.com/cosinusoidally/mishmashvm/ and https://github.com/cosinusoidally/tcc_bootstrap_alt/
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Would and how much would it shrink when if, while, and for were replaced by the simple goto routine? (after all, in assembly there is only jmp and no other fancy jump instruction (I assume) ). And PS, it's "chose your own adventure". :-) I love minimalism.
The way hashing is used for tokens and for making a pseudo symbol table is such an elegant idea.
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I think the same. Really nice project and good trick with hashing tokens. PS. There left 21 bytes (21 * 0x00 - from 0x01e0 to 0x01fd). Maybe something can be packed there ;)
U.S. Jobs Disappear at Fastest January Pace Since Great Recession (forbes.com)
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Tariffs are bad for the economy. Foreign countries are ditching US partnerships, contracts. Less travelers are coming to US. Wow I wonder when will we open our eye. In the middle of all these, US is ditching its allies and planning to invade sovereign countries (Greenland).
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Tariffs, forcing capital into 7 very large companies instead of small startups, wage suppression through weird offshoring and immigration schemes so on and so forth. There are seemingly unending number of issues that all contribute to the same outcome we're seeing today.
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Foreign adversaries are getting exactly what they wanted, their manipulation of US politics has been extremely successful.
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We did this to ourselves. Let’s not make excuses.
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So much winning
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Allowing individuals to hoard enough wealth to corrupt, at will, the system that gave them their wealth - maybe that wasn’t such a good idea after all. But who knew?
And yet the dow jones just passed 50K, an ATH. That makes no sense...unless the economy is an a sort of death spiral where companies layoff employees, then stock goes, then companies layoff more, then stock goes up, so on and so forth. Ouroboros. The economy is eating its own tail.
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> And yet the dow jones just passed 50K, an ATH. The price of stock is based in dollars. The value of the dollar goes down due to inflation, so the stock goes up, while not actually changing in value.
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If you think of the DJIA as being denominated in dollars the ATH looks less impressive.
The country desperately needs antitrust action to vastly increase. We need all these monopolies and cartels broken up so that there is a dynamic competitive environment in all sectors of the economy
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You’re talking about something that happens in a country that wants free markets. It doesn’t really apply to countries that want oligopolies or monopolies.
Any system based on exponential growth will have almost all people become serfs as even if their capital grows it falls behind the growth of older capital
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The population grows exponentially. Why would you think the system would work against that?
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Ideally our political systems act as a sigmoid filter over the growth, benefits, and harms
Important context is January is historically the month where most layoffs are enacted. Not saying the number is insignificant, just not entirely unexpected.
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It’s a disaster when compared to other Januarys.
These people don’t have an SSN. You can’t pay taxes without one
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They can and do pay taxes with ITIN instead of SSN, and some non-citizens are eligible for SSN anyway. Undocumented immigrants have paid billions in taxes annually. https://bipartisanpolicy.org/article/how-do-undocumented-immigrants-pay-federal-taxes-an-explainer/ The larger point that they may be omitted on reports like this may still stand, but it’s not because every single one is unable to be tabulated in the count by definition.
Well those are incredibly ignorant and mostly likely strongly biased beliefs. When I worked for NASA and the DoE, I was surrounded by the most competent, hard-working, productive people I've ever known. Silicon Valley engineers are a joke compared to government engineers. Silicon valley people have newer toys and more flexible funding and no oversight, but government employees have vastly more impact and actual measurable utility. Only morons born into enough safety and security that they can be completely ignorant of how the actual world works believe the government is unnecessary and as many government jobs as possible should be deleted. The owner of that twitter platform you linked to killed several hundred thousand people last year, and again this year, and again next year, through sheer narcissistic incompetence. Is that a good source for any information at all?
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Also a good bs indicator: 'illegal alien jobs'. As if the demand vanishes with the poor souls to uganda. It just framing in hope of twisting a win out of it, because if you would have stated that sub-minimum wage jobs are in decline, this would be a terrible economic indicator for the US.
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I agree with your opposition to the comment above, but I feel like the condescension towards silicon valley, and non-government employees is not a way to start a healthy dialogue. Like you are not going to convince anybody by calling 80+% of people here (private sector employees) "a joke". I agree that randos on twitter are a bad source of information.
The original roll out of Healthcare.gov is a counterpoint. Looking at salaries, senior developers working for the government get paid about the same as entry level software engineers who get return offers at BigTech. Well actually senior developers in government only about 10%-20% more. And even if you did work in pub sec, if you were good, why would you want to work for the government when you can get paid a lot more working in the private sector and consulting for the government? I know how much senior cloud consultants working at AWS make working in the WWPS. I was there as an l5. Amazon is a shitty place to work. But I doubt it’s any worse than the government right now. GCP and Microsoft (not just Azure) both also pay their consultants a lot more than government employees make. I’m not saying the government isn’t needed. But the best and the brightest aren’t going to give up the amount of money they can make in the private sector - especially now that government jobs are far from a secure paycheck
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You are arguing that everyone is as money driven as you are. Plenty of people who are more altruistic people take employment based on non money factors all the time. Plenty of people will also earn their chunk of change as an l5 at Amazon or whatever, then transition to a lower paid job with more impact. In fact, I know almost nobody who makes their employer decisions based on the pay factor alone.
> In the context of investing there is a correct price for financial assets that is given by trading everything back to dollars in the present. This doesn't make sense though. The only reason I would buy an investment is if I believe it will grow in value from the point that I bought it. That means I'm pricing it at its future ccost.obviously other people are doing the same, so the actual cost of the investment will always rise above current value if people believe its a good investment.
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I didn't write out enough to fully explain the idea. Here is the wiki page where you can find the details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_discount_factor
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It’s not irrelevant to this discussion considering 50% of our unicorns are immigrant founded.
What a childish argument.
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I need you to understand that immigration controls are fundamentally and inherently antithetical to freedom of speech, freedom of movement, and freedom of association. And this applies both to immigrants and to citizens. Imagine if you needed government approval to live with the one you love! What a completely unreasonable intervention into the private lives of ordinary people. Oh wait, that's the actual reality immigrants live in.
Since the end of WW2, Democratic administrations have presided over significantly higher job growth than Republican administrations. https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/ZXZLAMEEVJHZRDDY5LGDFZ3OEQ.png
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Yea, you can create programs that create jobs, by spending taxes. So this should be zero surprise. The question you should /really/ be asking, since taxes are involved, is, was that hiring actually effective? Did we create jobs that actually provided lasting value to the world? Or did we just juice the numbers for the polls?
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There has to be some lag, and it is more about who controls Congress. For example, the housing crisis and bubble were largely driven by legislation passed years earlier, including the 1999 repeal of Glass Steagall under Clinton. That was passed by a Republican controlled Congress, and the crisis eventually exploded under Bush. So I do not think either Clinton or Bush can be directly blamed for the housing crash. It is the repeal of the glass steagall act. And was the dot com bubble crash in early 2000s caused by Clinton or by Bush? Or some legalization passed a long time ago? Or it just a business cycle? More broadly, I would argue that presidents, and even legislators, have limited control over the actual health of the economy. Are we going to say Trump is responsible for the AI boom? And if this AI boom collapses into a massive bubble burst under the next administration, will that president be blamed instead?
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It's the ratcheting mechanism of bipartisanship. One party develops, the other party cracks down on potential economic wins for the working class. Both parties make sure the capitalist class stay in power.
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Is it possible that can be attributed to lagging effects of their predecessors’ policies?
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The consecutive GOP events don't seem to point to that.
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I don't think presidents have all that much to do with the economy (vs. the legislature). Well... maybe the most recent example is to the contrary with certain actions that historically should have been the role of Congress.
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I disagree, but my personal belief is the economy and the government stewardship thereof work much the same way as WH40K ork technology
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Sort of. I've done a lot of thinking about this one, and realize that it's really not just "one person" but a very large team of individuals, along with the "politics" of everything. If the President brings on a good staff, makes solid cabinet appointments, and they themself being a singular large part of the legislative process in modern years--given that it's usually fairly difficult to get 2/3rds of Congress to agree on anything --you can see the President actually has significantly more influence than you'd think. In addition, it's the circles that person runs in and the circles that person's people run in. Do you think judge or cabinet appointments are decided on by one person? Sure, the President is a figurehead in this position and ultimately has to say yes or no, but there's a large pool of candidates out there and it's up to the staffers, maybe friends, maybe people in the know to propose those people to the President. So while on paper the President doesn't, or shouldn't have that much power--in actuality with our current political process it's certainly much more. Now, that said, just like the billionaires--they can only control so much. At least in the United States, there are competing interests even among the wealthy class, and sometimes shit just sort of happens--like a meteor killing the dinosaurs....or the release of decades of e-mails, videos, documents, and communications surrounding their pedophile behavior on a secret island in the Caribbean.
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That's true. Though in this case the administration is taking a much more active hand in the economy than any in almost a century. For the most part the correlation between administrations and the economy is arbitrary. But in this case I would make a case that it is causative.
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If that were true then why would there be such a glaringly clear example that presidential party influences economic performance?
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Mostly coincidence. There aren't that many data points. There are under a dozen Presidents in the last half century. Too small to attribute significance. I do believe that there could be a small causative effect, but there is usually a very long delay between cause and effect.
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Man all kind of inferences get made on HN that new jobs will just appear after AI takes existing jobs because... jobs appeared in the past. This party/president assumption seems much more likely that that one which is based on zero actual data points but seems to be gospel to half of HN.
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Wonder if it's more of the activist having an affect? During democrat administrations, groups like NRA scream "they're coming for your guns" causing gun sales to go up during democrat admins and then drop off during GOP admins as the rhetoric drops off.
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Is there a line chart or a stacked area chart of this over time? This seems to confirm that Joe Biden created the most jobs of any president in recent modern history.
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Joe Biden "created" jobs the way covid "created" job vacancies. Maybe time periods with worldwide upheaval should be taken with a little salt.
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Joe Biden also presided over the largest America that ever existed, and took power at a moment when a huge rebound in jobs was inevitable.
I looked this up. "10 of the 11 recessions between 1953 and 2020 began under Republican administrations”. It seems Republican = Recession.
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It seems silly to blame these on the president though, consider just the past two recessions and how little they had to do with the actions of POTUS...
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They are still responsible for making the recession easier or harder or longer The Tarifs and the way trump acts, for example, massively disrupts markets.
Ok, but is it cause or effect? Maybe Republicans do well when there is fear about the economy and a recession is coming.
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Depends. If it's a Republican president in office, we must look at many factors, it's a difficult thing, y'see, many variables and such, market fluctuations, etc. etc. etc. If it's a Dem president in office? 100% the Dem's fault.
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Isn't literally this, but unironically, what dem supporters are doing in the least voted comments here? Why try to make it as if it was the "opposite side" doing it while I'm reading it?
Congress has a substantially greater impact on the business climate than the President.
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I'm not so sure either have much impact. Economic policy doesn't change much between administrations and Congress has been ineffective for a long time. Politics is mostly culture war things these days. The Fed seems to be the big driver of the economy. Other than that, the government is moving things at the margins. Even Trumps tariff shenanigans don't seem to have rocked the boat much.
That’s unless you have a Congress that lets the President usurp the pose of the purse that should be theirs and Supreme Court that rubber stamps everything he does
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If you are referring to the current administration, SCOTUS has barely "rubber stamped" any of his actions, and has rejected several already (though we will see with tariffs... but Polymarket has it only 31% in favor of the president so at least the odds are in our favor).
That Thatcher example was brutal. I have an interest in social housing (Austria, Singapore). The idea of selling it like that is insane to me, like if Taiwan sold TSMC for pennies on the dollar. And made it illegal to start another chipmaking company.
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> Ultimately, the new homeowners were also borrowers and paid portions of their yearly income as interest on long-term mortgages The United States does similar and we also have a nice twist on the concept. We have $38,000,000,000,000 in national debt which increased $2,500,000,000,000 in 2025. Which is like $111,764 per citizen with ~$3,000 in interest payments a year each, all going to a handful of families (and Japan) who hold most the debt as an investment. The US government borrowed the money, gave the money back to people the government borrowed it from in form of kickback contracts, subsidies to oil companies and farmers who vote for the politicians who increased the debt by $2,500,000,000,000 in 2025, and every citizen is responsible for paying the interest on it. As an American, all of this is insane to me.
Wasn't trying to be political, just making an observation that 4 years is probably too short of a time to credit policy changes within a single administration.
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Yet it tracks for decades with successive D/R presidents, suggesting that this 4 year excuse is not enough to dismiss the correlation
For me, it seems like a logical consequence of overheating the economy by cutting interest rates to zero during the COVID period.
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Combined with stimulus and PPP
No. You had a choice. I voted for Harris (who I do not like as a progressive) instead of chaos and destruction, others had the same choice. To not vote out of protest was a vote for this. Better luck next time. ~2M voters 55+ age out every year. Can we do better? Remains to be seen.
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1/3 are D and voted Harris 1/3 are R and voted Trump 1/3 are I and voted their wallet handwavy, but not inaccurate
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Bad news for the wallet folks, the economy is going to get worse.
> That's rather reductionist for such a complex set of circumstances and events that led to the eventual results I think this is usually true, but there hasn't really been a global shock of the sort we had in 2020 or 2008 or 2001. What would you say are the salient circumstances now?
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now is not 2024, when people felt the sting of inflation and the collective trauma of covid now is still largely the the same, top 2-3 issues are related to money, cultural or societal issues are on the rise and shifting in polls, a welcomed sign
British drivers over 70 to face eye tests every three years (bbc.com)
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> Drivers in the UK must be able to read a number plate from 20 metres away, according to the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA). Unless I've botched the math and/or what the internet tells me about the size of the characters on a UK number plate is wrong this seems to be a bit overboard. The internet is telling me that the characters are 79mm tall and 50mm wide (except for '1' and 'I') with a 14mm stroke. My eyes right now are about 250mm from my monitor. Something that is 79mm tall and 20m away would have the same angular size as something 250mm away that is 79mm / 20m x 250mm = 0.9875mm tall. If I set the size to 75% in Chrome that is the size of the numbers on this page in the timestamps and the submission points and comment counts. It is about 1/2 the size of the numbers in the text box that I'm writing this comment in. I've just taken a photo of that and will include a link to it to show how small that is [1]. In that I'm holding a ruler next to the left side of the text. The "180" up where it says "180 points" is what you have to be able to read to pass the test. (If you can't see the photo because Imgur blocks your country just grab a ruler, hold it vertically 25cm in front of you, and the apparent size of the space between the mm marks is the size character you need to read). I have no idea what road signs and markings are like in the UK, but in the US in ~50 years of driving I don't think I've ever needed to read anything anywhere near that small. [1] https://imgur.com/a/NGuPdfF
>The shift from male to female is fascinating Is that like a dog whistle for "perfectly in line with stereotypes"? What I wanna see is how it maps vs wealth. Because I have a theory...
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I don't think it fits with stereotypes. I would have thought older ladies would be relatively safe.
You can anonymously report your concerns to the DVLA at [1]. Select "driver's medical". I had to do this with an elderly family member who refused to stop driving despite being manifestly physically and cognitively incapable. Its a difficult call but you may be saving someone's life. [1] https://contact.dvla.gov.uk/driver/capture-transaction-type
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+1. My brother and I had to do this for my Dad. We felt awful but it was necessary.
I disagree. This case is very controversial, at least from the point of view of the parent. Being reported may be seen as betrayal by the parent, even if it is objectively justified. That could also be the reason why „everyone around“ failed to act, even if they agree. Being anonymous certainly helps.
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>Being reported may be seen as betrayal by the parent, It kind of is no matter how you slice it. You're prioritizing other interests above theirs specifically to their detriment and then saying "it's justified because X". No value for X no matter how legitimate is gonna change the fundametal reality. >even if it is objectively justified. That could also be the reason why „everyone around“ failed to act, If everyone around thinks it's justified then they'll have no problem supporting the guy who does want to act. Buuuut, and this is a big bug. "Will support someone narcing on someone to cause the state to take action" is a way higher bar "will support a DIY solution". Showing up to or organizing your friend's intervention is a way lower bar than throwing them under the bus to the cops. What we're discussing here is basically the "lite" version of the latter.
How many km walking would that be? 4 min total must be a short distance.
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Not the OP, but walking may not be feasible. Sometimes the only connection is a road dangerous for pedestrians. Freezing or scorching or rainy weather is another problem.
Software factories and the agentic moment (factory.strongdm.ai)
Honestly I've not found a huge amount of value from the "science". There are plenty of papers out there that look at LLM productivity and every one of them seems to have glaring methodology limitations and/or reports on models that are 12+ months out of date. Have you seen any papers that really elevated your understanding of LLM productivity with real-world engineering teams?
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The writing on this website is giving strong web3 vibes to me / doesn't smell right. The only reason I'm not dismissing it out of hand is basically because you said this team was worth taking a look at. I'm not looking for a huge amount of statistical ceremony, but some detail would go a long way here. What exactly was achieved for what effort and how?
No, I agree! But I don’t think that observation gives us license to avoid the problem. Further, I’m not sure this elevates my understanding: I’ve read many posts on this space which could be viewed as analogous to this one (this one is more tempered, of course). Each one has this same flaw: someone is telling me I need to make a “organization” out of agents and positive things will follow. Without a serious evaluation, how am I supposed to validate the author’s ontology? Do you disagree with my assessment? Do you view the claims in this content as solid and reproducible? My own view is that these are “soft ideas” (GasTown, Ralph fall into a similar category) without the rigorous justification. What this amounts to is “synthetic biology” with billion dollar probability distributions — where the incentives are setup so that companies are incentivized to convey that they have the “secret sauce” … for massive amounts of money. To that end, it’s difficult to trust a word out of anyone’s mouth — even if my empirical experiences match (along some projection).
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The multi-agent "swarm" thing (that seems to be the term that's bubbling to the top at the moment) is so new and frothy that is difficult to determine how useful it actually is. StrongDM's implementation is the most impressive I've seen myself, but it's also incredibly expensive. Is it worth the cost? Cursor's FastRender experiment was also interesting but also expensive for what was achieved. I think my favorite current example at the moment was Anthropic's $20,000 C compiler from the other day. But they're an AI vendor, demos from non-vendors carry more weight. I've seen enough to be convinced that there's something there, but I'm also confident we aren't close to figuring out the optimal way of putting this stuff to work yet.
I was about to say the same thing! Yet another blog post with heaps of navel gazing and zero to actually show for it. The worst part is they got simonw to (perhaps unwittingly or social engineering) vouch and stealth market for them. And $1000/day/engineer in token costs at current market rates? It's a bold strategy, Cotton. But we all know what they're going for here. They want to make themselves look amazing to convince the boards of the Great Houses to acquire them. Because why else would investors invest in them and not in the Great Houses directly.
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I think this comment is slightly unfair :( We’ve been working on this since July, and we shared the techniques and principles that have been working for us because we thought others might find them useful. We’ve also open-sourced the nlspec so people can build their own versions of the software factory. We’re not selling a product or service here. This also isn’t about positioning for an acquisition: we’ve already been in a definitive agreement to be acquired since last month. It’s completely fair to have opinions and to not like what we’re putting out, but your comment reads as snarky without adding anything to the conversation.
Out of interest, what anti-patterns did you see? (I'm continuing to try to learn Rust!)
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To pick a few (from the server crate, because that's where I looked): - The StoreError type is stringly typed and generally badly thought out. Depending on what they actually want to do, they should either add more variants to StoreError for the difference failure cases, replaces the strings with a sub-types (probably enums) to do the same, or write an type erased error similar to (or wrapping) the ones provided by anyhow, eyre, etc, but with a status code attached. They definitely shouldn't be checking for substrings in their own error type for control flow. - So many calls to String::clone [0]. Several of the ones I saw were actually only necessary because the function took a parameter by reference even though it could have (and I would argue should have) taken it by value (If I had to guess, I'd say the agent first tried to do it without the clone, got an error, and implemented a local fix without considering the broader context). - A lot of errors are just ignored with Result::unwrap_or_default or the like. Sometimes that's the right choice, but from what I can see they're allowing legitimate errors to pass silently. They also treat the values they get in the error case differently, rather than e.g. storing a Result or Option. - Their HTTP handler has an 800 line long closure which they immediately call, apparently as a substitute for the the still unstable try_blocks feature. I would strongly recommend moving that into it's own full function instead. - Several if which should have been match. - Calls to Result::unwrap and Option::unwrap. IMO in production code you should always at minimum use expect instead, forcing you to explain what went wrong/why the Err/None case is impossible. It wouldn't catch all/most of these (and from what I've seen might even induce some if agents continue to pursue the most local fix rather than removing the underlying cause), but I would strongly recommend turning on most of clippy's lints if you want to learn rust. [0] https://rust-unofficial.github.io/patterns/anti_patterns/borrow_clone.html
Can you make an ethical declaration here, stating whether or not you are being compensated by them? Their page looks to me like a lot of invented jargon and pure narrative. Every technique is just a renamed existing concept. Digital Twin Universe is mocks, Gene Transfusion is reading reference code, Semport is transpilation. The site has zero benchmarks, zero defect rates, zero cost comparisons, zero production outcomes. The only metric offered is "spend more money". Anyone working honestly in this space knows 90% of agent projects are failing. The main page of HN now has three to four posts daily with no substance, just Agentic AI marketing dressed as engineering insight. With Google, Microsoft, and others spending $600 billion over the next year on AI, and panicking to get a return on that Capex....and with them now paying influencers over $600K [1] to manufacture AI enthusiasm to justify this infrastructure spend, I won't engage with any AI thought leadership that lacks a clear disclosure of financial interests and reproducible claims backed by actual data. Show me a real production feature built entirely by agents with full traces, defect rates, and honest failure accounting. Or stop inventing vocabulary and posting vibes charts. [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46925821
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> Every technique is just a renamed existing concept. Digital Twin Universe is mocks, Gene Transfusion is reading reference code, Semport is transpilation. The site has zero benchmarks, zero defect rates, zero cost comparisons, zero production outcomes. The only metric offered is "spend more money". Repeating for emphasis, because this is the VERY obvious question anyone with a shred of curiosity would be asking not just about this submission but about what is CONSTANTLY on the frontpage these days. There could be a very simple 5 question questionnaire that could eliminate 90+% of AI coding requests before they start: - Is this a small wrapper around just querying an existing LLM - Does a brief summary of this searched with "site:github" already return dozens or hundreds of results? - Is this a classic scam (pump&dump, etc) redone using "AI" - Is this needless churn between already high level abstractions of technology (dashboard of dashboards, yaml to json, python to java script, automation of automation framework)
Coding agents have replaced every framework I used (blog.alaindichiappari.dev)
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Good article: Software Engineering is finally being liberated from the "Middle Work" of the last decade. The AI tsunami isn't just about coding faster—it’s about reclaiming architectural sovereignty from hyperscaler blueprints. The future is Just-in-Time and Highly Customized. My full thoughts here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/carlcarrie_software-engineering-is-back-activity-7425998281358417921-NroB?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAFhwLIBV2C-gSAGPc9b6jOkykpmGaIobvI
To the people who are against AI programming, honest question: why do you not program in assembly? Can you really say "you" "programmed" anything at all if a compiler wrote your binaries? This is a 100% honest question. Because whatever your justification to this is, it can probably be used for AI programmers using temperature 0.0 as well, just one abstraction level higher. I'm 100% honestly looking forward to finding a single justification that would not fit both scenarios.
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I am not "against" AI programming, although I confess I don't really know what that means... coders and business folk are gonna do whatever gets the job done and opinions by and large matter not a whit. However: > ..it can probably be used for AI programmers using temperature 0.0 as well, just one abstraction level higher. Right, but... approximately zero users of AI for coding are setting temperature to 0 not to mention changing temperature at all. So this is a comparison to a world that doesn't really exist. Additionally, C code compiles much much closer to the same assembly and microcode regardless of compiler as compared to temperature zero prompts across different AIs.
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I dislike it when rhetorical flourishes start with "honest question...". Maybe using AI assistant instead of directly writing code is equivalent to using a high level language instead of assembly and maybe it isn't. So at least begin your discussion as "I think programmers who don't use AI are like programmers who insist on assembly rather than a high level language" (and they existed back in the day). I mean, an "honest question" is one where you are honestly unsure whether you will get an answer or what the answer will be. That's completely different from honestly feeling your opponents have no good arguments. Just about the opposite, really. By the way, the reason I view AI assistants and high level language compilers as fundamentally different is that high level languages compilers are mostly deterministic, mostly you can determine both the code generated and the behavior of code in terms of the high level language. AI created/assisted code is fundamentally undermined relative to the source (a prompt) on a much wider basis than the assembly created by a high level language compiler (whose source is source code). Edit: formatting
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Compiling the symbols into a binary is not the bottleneck. Formalizing the contract for interacting with the real world is and always has been the bottleneck.
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Nah, it's the 50 tabs in my browser that I no longer have to open before I know the correct incantation to type. I bet someone knows how many tabs an average deveoper is keeping opened when working (like Google or someone with a nasty spying browser extension) - would be cool to see that plotted against the fraction of Github commits that are co-authored by Claude. I predict a fairly tight negative correlation.
A significant number of developers and businesses are going to have an absolutely brutal rude awakening in the not too distant future. You can build things this way, and they may work for a time, but you don't know what you don't know (and experience teaches you that you only find most stuff by building/struggling; not sipping a soda while the AI blurts out potentially secure/stable code). The hubris around AI is going to be hard to watch unwind. What the moment is I can't predict (nor do I care to), but there will be a shift when all of these vibe code only folks get cooked in a way that's closer to existential than benign. Good time to be in business if you can see through the bs and understand how these systems actually function (hint: you won't have much competition soon as most people won't care until it's too late and will "price themselves out of the market").
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> A significant number of developers and businesses are going to have an absolutely brutal rude awakening in the not too distant future. I pray (?) for times like the ones you predict. But companies can stay irrational longer than the average employee can afford.
I think it would be the opposite and we are all in for a rude awakening. If you have tried playing with Opus 4.6 you would know what I am talking about.
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I tell my colleagues we're in the instantaneous peak of the AI developer relationship. We're still valued, still paid really well, and our jobs will get easier and easier probably for the next 5-10 years! After that, maybe not so great for many of us, with the developers that use software as a means continuing to do just fine (hard math/science/optimization/business planning/etc).
An HN post earlier this week declared that “AI is killing B2B SaaS”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46888441 Developers and businesses with that attitude could experience a similarly rude awakening.
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If you've ever been responsible for large systems, you'll know why that is an incredibly naive position to take.
It's nice that AI can fix bugs fast, but it's better to not even have bugs in the first place. By using someone else's battle tested code (like a framework) you can at least avoid the bugs they've already encountered and fixed.
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> better to not have bugs in the first place you must have never worked on any software project ever
What kind of project / prompts - what’s working for you? /I spent a good 20 years in the software world but have been away doing other things professionally for couple years. Recently was in the same place as you, with a new project and wanting to try it out. So I start with a generic Django project in VSCode, use the agent mode, and… what a waste of time. The auto-complete suggestions it makes are frequently wrong, the actions it takes in response to my prompts tend to make a mess on the order of a junior developer. I keep trying to figure out what I’m doing wrong, as I’m prompting pretty simple concepts at it - if you know Django, imagine concepts like “add the foo module to settings.py” or “Run the check command and diagnose why the foo app isn’t registered correctly” Before you know it, it’s spiraling out of control with changes it thinks it is making, all of which are hallucinations.
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I'm just using Gemini in the browser. I'm not ready to let it touch my code. Here are my last two prompts, for context the project is about golf course architecture: Me, including the architecture_diff.py file: I would like to add another map to architecture_diff. I want the map to show the level of divergence of the angle of the two shots to the two different holes from each point. That is, when your are right in between the two holes, it should be a 180 degree difference, and should be very dark, but when you're on the tee, and the shot is almost identical, it should be very light. Does this make sense? I realize this might require more calculations, but I think it's important. Gemini output was some garbage about a simple naive angle to two hole locations, rather than using the sophisticated expected value formula I'm using to calculate strokes-to-hole... thus worthless. Follow up from me, including the course.py and the player.py files: I don't just want the angle, I want the angle between the optimal shot, given the dispersion pattern. We may need to update get_smart_aim in the player to return the vector it uses, and we may need to cache that info. We may need to update generate_strokes_gained_map in course to also return the vectors used. I'm really not sure. Take as much time as you need. I'd like a good idea to consider before actually implementing this. Gemini output now has a helpful response about saving the vector field as we generate the different maps I'm trying to create as they are created. This is exactly the type of code I was looking for.
Dead wrong. Because the world is still filled with problems that would once have been on the wrong side of the is it worth your time matrix ( https://xkcd.com/1205/ ) There are all sorts of things that I, personally, should have automated long ago that I threw at claud to do for me. What was the cost to me? Prompt and a code review. Meanwhile, on larger tasks an LLM deeply integrated into my IDE has been a boon. Having an internal debate on how to solve a problem, try both, write a test, prove out what is going to be better. Pair program, function by function with your LLM, treat it like a jr dev who can type faster than you if you give it clear instructions. I think you will be shocked at how quickly you can massively scale up your productivity.
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The matrix framing is a very nice and way to put it. This morning I asked my assistant to code up a nice debugger for a particular flow in my application. It’s much better than I would have had time/patience to build myself for a nice-to-have.
Now run that loop 1000 times. What does the code /system look like. It is going to be more like evolution (fit to environment) than engineering (fit to purpose). It will be fascinating to watch nonetheless.
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[delayed]
Sure, if all you ask it to do is fix bugs. You can also ask it to work on code health things like better organization, better testing, finding interesting invariants and enforcing them, and so on. It's up to you what you want to prioritize.
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And what happens when these different objectives conflict or diverge ? Will it be able to figure out the appropriate trade-offs, live with the results and go meta to rethink the approach or simply delude itself ? We would definitely lose these skills if it continues like this.
I'm no fan of AI in terms of its long term consequences, but being able to "just do things" with the aid of AI tools, diving head first into the most difficult programming projects, is going to improve the human programming skills worldwide to levels never before imaginable
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>is going to improve the human programming skills worldwide to levels never before imaginable "We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery. On a quiz that covered concepts they’d used just a few minutes before, participants in the AI group scored 17% lower than those who coded by hand" https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skills
I make mission critical software for robust multi robotic control in production flying real robots every day 16% of our production codebase is generated from claude or another LLM Just because you can’t do it doesn’t mean other people can’t Denial is a river
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Yikes.
CTO at Gambit AI? How generous of you to talk your book while insulting us. At least we know what to avoid.
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My guess: Their UASs run modified PX4 firmware.
> Every time I read writing from this perspective that exceeds a paragraph, I quickly realize the article itself was written by an LLM. Likewise, I think that this mentality is a modern day conversion disorder. "Everything I don't agree with is an LLM, I have no proof it just feels good!"
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It’s the ‘woke’ of the computer world.
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