An alternative: don't use LLMs. Focus on the enjoyment of coding, not on becoming more efficient. Because the lion's share of the gains from increased efficiency are mainly going to the CEOs.
This might be good short term advice, but in the medium and long term I think devs who don't use any AI will start to be much slower at delivery than devs who do. I'm alreay seeing it IRL (and I'm not a fan of AI coding, so this sucks for me)
Good news for you then, this idea is less and less born out by the data. The productivity and efficiency gains aren't there, so there's no reason to be compelled by the spectre of obsolescence. The models may be getting better, but it doesn't seem to be actually changing much for programming. The illusion of busywork, perhaps, is swallowing up the decreased mental bandwidth in constant context switching.
Slower in initial delivery maybe, but the maintenance and debugging of production applications requires intimate knowledge of the code base usually. The amount of code AI writes will require AI itself to manage it since no human would inundate themselves with that much code. Will it be faster even so? We simply won’t know because those vibe coded apps have just entered production. The horror stories can’t be written yet because the horror is ongoing.
I’m big on AI, but vibe coding is such a fuck around and find out situation.
Oh yeah, I totally agree. Vibe coding is not (anytime soon at least) going to be a thing.
But using AI tools for things like completing simple functions (co-pilot) or asking questions about a codebase can still be huge time savers. I've also had really good success with having AI generate me basic scripts that would have taken 45 minutes of work, but it gets me a working script in 3. It's not the revolution that's been promised, but it definitely makes me faster even though I don't like it
This. If there's one thing I've found AI to be a huge timesaver for, it's writing things that interact with libraries/frameworks/codebases that have an atrociously large surface area. AI can sift through the noise so much faster than I can and get me going down the right pack in way less time.
(Aside: Hi Ben! If you are who I think you are, we started at the same company on the same day back in August of 2014.)
Plenty of small FAFO stories circulate already. There will certainly be more. Lots of demonstration code out there in the training data meant only for illustrative purposes, and all too often vibe coding overlooks the rock bottom basics of security.
For wage workers, not learning the latest productivity tools will result in job loss. By the time it is expected of your role, if you have not learned already, you won't be given the leniency to catch up on company time. There is no impactful resistance to this through individual protest, only by organizing your peers in industry
When you can actually see it improving life, for one, rather than just improving efficiency, which doesn't really benefit the individual but only the corporation.
But often at the expense of something else: the commons, employee satisfaction, or even the joy of having just enough. No, costs are not as important as many other things.
Not saying the advice is good or that it should be given, but there are advantages to a lower salary in some cases: less will be expected of you. Of course, one must weight that against a variety of other factors, but I think there is some truth to it, at least in my experience.
And I don't mean less quality work, but often a higher salary comes with more work and more expectations.
Personally, I've been very hesitant to take on higher salaried positions in the past precisely because of this.
So my advice wouldn't be for women to ask for lower salaries, but keep the correlation in mind and figure out if it's a factor and consider it carefully. A higher salary often means less personal freedom. Again, not true in all cases, but true in some.
In my career the more I was paid, the less I relatively knew.
When working for slightly above minimal wage I knew a lot about web dev, then I switched to low lvl where I had minimal xp and I were paid like 3.5 times more
Sometimes that can be the case, it is true. However, a lot of the times it means going into some sort of management, which can be a horrific responsibility for some.
That's not gender specific though. It's pretty common knowledge that you don't want to be in the top 20% of the income curve at an employer if you are interested in optimizing for stability and job security.
Well, personally I think on average women are less likely to sacrifice themselves for typical careers. Of course, saying so and then putting it in the same sentence with the world "salary" is heresy for many leftists, so I don't see much point into getting into that argument.
More broadly, can a comment on a forum thread that isn't directed at anyone in particular really be considered "mansplaining"? I consider that term to mean something like "a man explaining something to a woman because he assumes she doesn't know".
Just because the topic is about women doesn't mean a man can't post a thought that is relevant and (mildly) thought provoking.
>So my advice wouldn't be for women to ask for lower salaries
It's right there in the comment. There's other "supporting" statements/phrases but that's really all you need to read.
>consider that term to mean something like "a man explaining something to a woman because he assumes she doesn't know".
What do you think that comment is doing? The comment is acting from a perspective of wisdom/knowledge as a male and addressing the entire female populace lol. It's textbook.
Honestly it was hilarious, I had quite a chuckle after reading that.
On a thread about how AI is surfacing implicit biases mind you. Crazy world right now.
Hey, my advice wasn't for women at all. It was just advice for myself and for people in general. I don't care at all about the headline or AI - if something goes wrong with AI, it's karma for your using it in the first place.
I said my original comment kind of as a joke (even if it was applicable), I don't think you meant anything nefarious by it.
But of course it elicited a pretty bland response on HN and immediately devolved into a meta discussion; which in and of itself is ironically, recursively topical.
Yeah, I took your comment as a joke, and I didn't mean anything by it. But I do think it's understandable that there's a very strong reaction against it. It's only natural for some men to denounce any hint of "mainsplaining" or other phenomena because if they don't, they are likely to be painted as collaborators in the oppressive hierarchy by overzealous leftists that pervade modern high-tech corporations.
Of course, there interesting thing is that pretty much nothing took place here except some casual discussion, which is turned into a farce in which no one really knows what anyone is talking about, and instead we have resorted to becoming heads of headless ideologies.
I'm not sure if "mansplaining" is the correct word, but the comment is a poster child of looking at an example of reported bias and saying "it's actually not that bad because ...".
If the model statistically significantly returns a different number for men and for women when controlling for all other factors, then it's a bias. I don't understand how this is even contentious.
Although the headline is not completely accurate, I do think that AI in general encourages for superficiality at the expense of depth and this will only continue in the software world. AI was a mistake.
I love the idea, but it's just to fringe to use for me. But I will say that I think the internet was far better before Google search really became strong, and before the corresponding massive increase in SEO spam.
Why not? I think a lot of people with traits like Musk would make us completely subservient without any freedom if he had the technology and opportunity to do so.
The article is talking about actual, literal, species-level extinction. Like, no humans left. That's the sort of "malice towards the species" meant here.
> a lot of people with traits like Musk would make us completely subservient without any freedom
That would be the "dystopia" the person you replied to mentioned.
Gary Marcus has a dichotomy between extinction versus bad actors. I feel a third possibiltiy is much more likely: a world of extreme specialization where AI reigns supreme, and where humans are mainly button-pushers. Those at the top and who still enjoy life will be the techies who are good at and enjoy making things with AI, which will be approximately 1% of the population. The other 99% will be administrators, button-pushers, and those on UBI who have a fairly meaningless existence without much dignity.
Because once 99% of the population lose the opportunity to at least learn a skill that they are good at, and (Importantly!!) for which they have some aptitude over others, and apply it, then they will face an existence of very little meaning. Like it or not, people want to be distinguishable from others, and if everyone can do everything with AI, then that disappears.
Techies don't like to admit it because they are at the top, but through AI, they are creating their own bubble world with their little toys that will act through the immense power of AI as an oligarchy that rules the listless and depressed masses.
This is such a utilitarianistic point of view, Not everyone is defined by their work, not everyone cares about how distinguishable they are from the others, or even how the others think of them, and I would even argue, that very few oligarchs/billionaires etc belong to the group of people that truly enjoy life.
Same. Or — just an idea — maybe it is time to kickstart an adapter so that we can plug a 386 into a LGA 1700 socket? A little underclocking, instruction translation, voltage conversion and presto.
The editor is 10mb. It's the grammar files that are represent the bulk, and those are optional.
And yes. Complaining about 100mb nowadays is ridiculous. You probably have larger logfiles sitting somewhere in disk doing nothing right now, regardless of your OS.
I know, I was talking about a hypothetical text editor being 100 MB (without grammar files).
And those log files can be easily wiped or rotated (i.e. compressed, which can greatly reduce their size), as they should. You do not do the same with your other files, do you?
Why the down-vote? You don't rotate your logs? Thought it is commonplace. Rotating logs includes compressing old ones. Or are your log files actually over 100 MB? Why? What are you printing? Output of "yes"? :D
As someone mentioned, Emacs is over 100 MB, so it does not have to be hypothetical. That said, I use emacs (and vim) interchangeably and I have nothing against it. I have LibreOffice, too, which is also a behemoth, but so is Haskell with its modules that I see getting updated regularly. In any case, I still prefer KISS and the fewer bloat as possible.
Long forgotten the times back in the days during the Great Editor Wars when Emacs was shunned as an acronym for "Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping". The youth of today ...
(*not that these size differences matter in practice -- helix's "bulk" is all in compiled language grammars, each of which is not loaded unless you use the language.)
I mean a base Mac Mini in 2025 comes with 256GB of storage. Some storage is still damn expensive.
But regardless, if someone were to only ever installing Helix on their system, you might have a point. But you probably want to install many applications and if every applications starts wasting storage, you will soon run out of space.
Almost all the size is language grammars, which are optional and removable. Some distros like Alpine make them separate packages.
But for desktop use, I think it's a good default to have everything "just work" out-of-the-box, because 110mb is nothing for typical developer machines.
Absolutely, I used one for many years before I was professional.
Out of curiosity, what hardware are you picturing those people running it on?
I've run Helix on a Daylight computer, which has a deliberately underpowered CPU (MediaTek Helio G99) and it's incredibly fast/snappy. 110mb is still near-trivial on the 128GB storage.
If you're (validly) worried about bloated software, note that Alpine's helix package is 10.3MB, which is smaller than their Neovim or Emacs packages. Individual language files are small (python is ~500kb uncompressed), there are just hundreds of supported languages. But installed ones are not loaded unless you edit the language.
(1) Reduces the value that people place on others, thereby creating a more narcisstic society
(2) Takes people's livelihoods away
(3) Is another method by which big tech concentrates the most wealth in their hands and the west becomes even more of a big tech oligarchy.
Programmers tend to stay in bubbles as they always have and happily promote it, not really noticing how dangerous and destructive it is.