you are not successfully riding the wave if you think prompting better is what they're talking about. They're talking about understanding the social structures your work happens in, how they're changing, and learning what you need to to be successful in that. Product and dev are getting closer together. Reviewing is becoming more important (and people don't have good theories about how to review, maybe you can make them.). New processes - and roles! are being created to deal with the vastly increased amounts of code produced, and the increased need for documentation and verification. Performance isn't a strong suit of the AIs, they get too rigidly stuck in existing architectures and fancy tricks, and often miss low hanging fruit that requires going and talking to some people to change the system. If you've got a statistics brain then metrics, logging and verification are booming (never met a manager who doesn't love a CHART). QA and testing are also bottlenecks of the new system, and unlikely to go away soon (ai can make tests, but it can't take the responsibility to say "this will work in production". You can!)
I don't care as much about LLMs deprecating my accumulated knowledge. After a quarter of a century in the industry I have plenty of stuff in my head of purely sentimental value.
But for me, the real catastrophe is that they took away all my motivation to learn which was the main work driver for me. Anything I can learn now, the models probably already know or will learn soon enough. Steering LLMs isn't anywhere near being a "deep" skill I'm used to having and it too is being eaten by the agentic tools faster than we learn it. The "make it good" button is coming. And I hate it.
Personally, I don't know a place more hyped up about AI than HN. It turned from my daily dose of tech excitement into a daily dose of tech anxiety.
As for your argument, there's no such thing as elegance. Code "elegance" is mainly maintainability (and, to a smaller degree, some other aspects like security, performance, etc.). The importance of maintainability greatly varies between projects, industries and individual subjective viewpoints, resulting in the diversity of attitudes to AI-assisted coding. That, of course, assumes that AI cannot match humans in maintainability. Which seems to be the case to me right now. But it also seems that the gap is closing, not as much through AI writing "better" code, but mainly through it being increasingly capable of maintaining "bad" code.
It’s a boosting strategy to go where people are mostly positive about AI and complain that they’re too negative. As in “guys, are you true believers or not?”
That said, I agree with dang’s read. This site is big enough that both camps are decently represented (expect “mine”, of course), but anyone sees only what they want to see. The boosters see only doomers, and viceversa.
I've recently found myself unable to finish articles that take more than a paragraph to announce their point. But starting with "Your life’s goal should be" is a level of boldness I wasn't prepared for.
I had human teachers who did that in middle/high school. Took me many years to pick out all the hallucinated bits of "knowledge". I don't think the current models are any less reliable that what we currently have on average.
I'll always remember my middle school science teaching telling us that nuclear fusion violates conservation of mass because the 2 protons in a pair of hydrogen nuclei combine to make helium with 4 nucleons. It's not true, but that's not the point.
But he was a great teacher anyway. He was engaging and kept the kids in line and learning. I eventually learned the truth, and most of my classmates forgot about it. Teaching, like flying a plane or driving a train, might become more about keeping watch over a small group of people and ensuring that things don't go off the rails, and that's fine.
This one feels less sinister than some other things at least to me, personally. You can reasonably doubt that the conservation of mass is violated and find out the truth based on that. But understanding more complex biology or historical context for some things? Granted, many of these things seem to be low stakes, but I'm sure there are some there are not (sex ed comes to mind).
Yes, together with mass-energy equivalency it would form a coherent argument, and then also a correct one - but the thing is that if incomplete, it still might sound funky enough to you to research it if you care.
I think it helps that it's a very narrow field to look at, compared to fuzzy and big-picture view of social studies, for example. So much room to be confidently wrong... And sadly I can't think of a solution, LLMs or not.
He was right that it violates conservation of mass. He was completely wrong that it violated it by adding 2 atomic mass units when hydrogen fuses.
In reality heavier isotopes of hydrogen fuse, conserving the total number of nucleons, but the resulting hydrogen has a lower rest mass than the parent particles. The extra mass is released as energy and the total energy is conserved.
By his logic the system either violated energy conservation (by creating nucleons while releasing energy) or was endothermic (creating nucleons from the surrounding energy).
There actually is a law of conservation of mass (it's the same law, because mass is energy) and it only appears violated if you forget about the particles that are zooming away at the speed of light. Of course the mass of a system changes if mass can flow in and out.
When you put a photon in a stationary box, the "relativistic mass" of the photon becomes part of the "rest mass" of the photon-box system. You can't ignore it.
I had a chemistry teacher who insisted that the fissile isotope of Uranium was U-238 not U-235. I challenged him on this multiple times and he refused to budge on this. I get that it's a simple mistake to make (it seems like U-238 is bigger so intuitively ought to be less stable) but he could have just looked it up and he didn't, I guess he was just so confident about it that he thought there was no way he could have been wrong about it.
I mean fusion and fission do violate conservation of mass and conservation of energy, they just don't violate conservation of mass and energy, right? We thought mass was strictly conserved until Einstein, and then we updated our understanding.
That's an American problem though. In most of Europe you need a masters degree to teach highschool and that involves at least an undergrad level of understanding the subjects you will teach.
E.g. in Hungary I had a university CS professor that originally wanted to be a highschool teacher and a highschool physics teacher that originally wanted to be researcher. Their choice of degree didn't determine which outcome they got. The researcher and teacher curriculum had an 80%+ overlap.
I think they are less reliable. For factually verifiable facts LLMs are doing worse than 90% for me. I've been told some incorrect things by educators, but at a much lower rate.
I've tried switching from JetBrains IDEs just a few days ago. The speed and memory footprint are very impressive. I ended up badly missing refactorings and some other features and configuring a debugging session looked like something that needs more time than I had on my hands. So went back for now. I hope they add more IDE features eventually. There's not much a pure text editor can offer over Emacs after all.
But this announcement sounds like they are prioritizing agents integration - the same thing that seemingly made JetBrains drop the ball on their core advantages.
Seriously. I love the IDE but given that my idle workload of Electron apps and Docker Desktop VM brings my discretionary allotment of RAM down from 32GB to 8GB, I have absolutely no headroom when running JetBrains IDEs so I keep them closed unless there's a specific feature I want.
What OS are you running? I currently have three Jetbrains IDEs open on my MacBook (M3 Max/36GB) and don’t notice any issue (although I don’t have any electron apps running which probably helps).
MacOS. I have Slack, Teams (different clients use different chat apps), Notion, Docker Desktop VM, several browser tabs, some corporate machine management stuff, and probably some things I'm forgetting about, all open all the time.
Was in the same boat. I ended up not using Zed because it had a bunch of minor quirks that annoyed me but I moved to vscode. I primarily write Typescript and C# these days. I was a JetBrains fanboy for years and it feels way too bloated now, stuff notoriously hangs or takes too long on my M3 Pro. I also love Claude Code integration with vscode just a bit too much to give it up for CLI.
Satoshi is a paper billionaire - he can't use a small fraction of his "wealth" to hire proper security. Simultaneously his "assets" are much more attractive to criminals. Imagine holding a regular billionaire hostage and demanding they give you a billion dollars. They'd probably have to sell 1B worth of stock, then convert it to cash (or crypto), etc. all of that requiring multiple interactions with different people and institutions.
Heisting multiple billions worth of crypto would have the same issues, just to a smaller degree. If that much illicit money is on the line, `mJurisdiction` which normally looks the other way might be tempted to investigate and confiscate it for their own benefit.
They also can't easily sell that amount quickly without repercussions (and without another institution like an exchange).
The real winner in this war is Israel. Iran's military might is now a shadow of its former self while all the costs have been paid by someone else: American taxpayers, gas consumers around the world, Arab states. Even the political costs are on Trump.
Certainly economically. NIS-USD exchange is now 3.09 and continuing to drop, reflecting optimism.
Strategically, it remains to be seen what will happen to the nuclear material in the peace talks. If Iran emerges from the war with an intact nuclear program due to a lack of American stamina to carry through and achieve its war goals, that would be an enormous strategic defeat for Israel.
I am working on a P2P VPN app that lets you route your traffic through a friend's Internet connection easily. It has a few distinct uses, but right now I am testing whether emigrants from authoritarian countries will be interested in providing censorship-free connectivity to their family/friends at home.
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