jakelsaunders94Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?
https://blog.jakesaunders.dev/is-anybody-else-bored-of-talking-about-ai/
This is bad in tech. But at least we are (relatively) well equipped to deal with it.
My partner teaches at a small college. These people are absolutely lost, with administration totally sold on the idea that "AI is the future" while lacking any kind of coherent theory about how to apply it to pedagogy.
Administrators are typically uncritically buying into the hype, professors are a mix of compliant and (understandably) completely belligerent to the idea.
Students are being told conflicting information -- in one class that "ChatGPT is cheating" and in the very next class that using AI is mandatory for a good grade.
Its an absolute disaster.
The wild part is they’re having this reaction while using the most rigid and limited interfaces to the LLMs. Imagine when the capabilities of coding agents surface up to these professions. It’s already starting to happen with Claude Cowork. I swear if I see another presentation with that default theme…
When industrialization was taking root yes indeed the factory jobs sucked AND it was the future. Two things can be true
By my understanding, the administrators at small colleges are among the least capable professionals one might find anywhere in the economy.
I've been telling my curious/adrift relatives that it's a machine takes a document and guesses what "usually" comes next based on other documents. You're not "chatting with it" as much as helping it construct a chat document.
The closer they can map their real problems to make-document-bigger, the better their results will be.
Alas, that alignment is nearly 100% when it comes to academic cheating.
What I miss is people showing off their hand-crafted libraries or frameworks. That’s become way less common now that everyone is building a layer up the stack. I fear we’ll be stuck in a permanent state of using Tailwind and React and all the LLM-favored libraries as they were frozen in time at the beginning of 2025. Then again, that’ll be the agent’s problem, not mine…
All that said, it’s extremely exciting. I’ve been in tech, in one way or another, for 25 years. This is the most energizing (and simultaneously exhausting) atmosphere I’ve ever felt. The 2006-2011 years of early Facebook, Uber, etc. were exciting but nothing like this. The future is developing faster than we can process it.
If it helps, I've mostly been using AI to implement things in the craziest languages I can justify.
I write Typescript and SQL by day, my last two personal projects were Rust and Perl.
I do worry that I'm not learning them as deeply, but I am learning them and without AI as an accelerant I probably wouldn't be trying them at all.
Perhaps we're in an AI summer and a tech winter. Winter is always the time when people hole up, dream, and work on whatever big thing is next.
We're about due for some new computing abstractions to shake things up I think. Those won't be conceived by LLMs, though they may aid in implementing them.
We have 2 decades of abstraction.
The stacks of turtles that we use to run everything are starting to show their bloat.
The other day someone was lamenting dealign with an onslaught of bot traffic, and having to deal with blocking it. Maybe we need to get back to good old fashioned engineering and optimization. There was a thread on here the other day about PC gamer recommending RSS readers and having a 36gb webpage ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47480507 )
> What I miss is people showing off their hand-crafted libraries or frameworks.
Saame. I wonder if the use of AI will lead to less invention and adoption of new ideas in favour of ideas with lots of training data.
This might sound like snark, but I truly don’t mean it that way.
I think what’s interesting about AI, and why there’s so much conversation, is that in order to be a good user of AI, you have to really understand software development. All the people I work with who are getting the most value out of using AI to deliver software are people who are already very high-skilled engineers, and the more years of real experience they have, the better.
I know some guys who were road warriors for many years —- everything from racking and cabling servers, setting up infrastructure, and getting huge cloud deployments going all the way to embedded software, video game backends, etc. These guys were already really good at automation, seeing the whole life cycle of software, and understanding all the pressure points. For them, AI is the ultimate power tool. They’re just flying with it right now. (All of them also are aware that the AI vampire is very real.)
There’s still a lot to learn, and the tools are still very, very early on, but the value is clear.
I think for quite a few people, engaging with AI is maybe the first time ever in their entire career they are having to engage with systems thinking in a very concrete and directed way. Consequently, this is why so many software engineers are having an identity crisis: they’ve spent most of their career focusing on one very small section of the overall SDLC, meanwhile believing that was mostly all there was that they needed to know.
So I think we’re going to keep talking for quite a while, and the conversation will continue to be very unevenly distributed. Paradoxically, I’m not bored of it, because I’m learning so much listening to intelligent people share their learnings.
Spot on take. The people I’ve noticed that say things like “it’s not useful” are the ones who are doing so little they can’t see the value.
This isn’t to say there’s not hype. Just that if you’re not seeing big productivity gains you need to make sure you really are an outlier and not just surplus to requirements.
I rarely come across people who flat out say "it's not useful". They exist, but IME they're the minority.
Rather, I hear a lot of nuanced opinions of how the tech is useful in some scenarios, but that the net benefit is not clear. I.e. the tech has many drawbacks that make it require a lot of effort to extract actual value from. This is an opinion I personally share.
In most cases, those "big productivity gains" are vastly blown out of proportion. In the context of software development specifically, sure, you can now generate thousands of lines of code in an instant, but writing code was never the bottleneck. It was always the effort to carefully design and implement correct solutions to real-world problems. These new tools can approximate this to an extent, when given relevant context and expert guidance, but the output is always unreliable, and very difficult to verify.
So anyone who claims "big productivity gains" is likely not bothering to verify the output, which in most cases will eventually come back to haunt them and/or anyone who depends on their work. And this should concern everyone.
That's only because we're trying to not be too condescending.
This is really not true. There are stories of people who had no background in software engineering who now write entire applications using AI. And I have personally seen this happen.
Smart people can hit the ground running if they're freed from the need to first learn the intricacies of a new language. We're going to see an explosion in the number of people writing software as clever people who invested their time in something other than learning to program are now able to write software for themselves.
What is not true, that "so many software engineers are having an identity crisis"?
I don't believe they said that folks new to AI can't make impressive use of it. They did however say that senior folks with lots of scrappy and holistic knowledge can do amazing things with it. Both can be true.
Before AI, there were also stories of people who had no background in software engineering who wrote entire applications using their fingers. This was called "learning to be a software engineer".
I don't mean to snipe at AI, because it really does seem to have set more people on the path of learning, but I was writing VB5 apps when I was 14 by copying poorly understood bits and pieces from books. Now people are doing basically the same but with less typing and everyone thinks it's a revolution.
Hey, I don't think this sounded like snark at all. Super grounded take.
> I think what’s interesting about AI, and why there’s so much conversation, is that in order to be a good user of AI, you have to really understand software development.
This I agree with completely. You can see it in the difference between a prompt where you know exactly what you want and when things are a little woolley. A tool in the hands of a well trained craftsperson is always better used.
> So I think we’re going to keep talking for quite a while
Me neither, and to be clear I'm okay with that. This was mostly a rant at the lack of diversity of discourse.
Thanks friend! Appreciate it.
Agree, the diversity of the discourse is not great. There's a lot of "omg I just got started waaauw" articles out there along with "we're all gonna die!" stuff. And then a few seams of very excellent insight.
Deep research at least helps with dowsing for the knowledge...
your HN handle is one of my top 10 fav tracks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2RSniyYNSc
{heart}
Doctor Love (Tom Moulton 12" Mix)
And here I was expecting this...
Calling Dr. Love
The "AI Vampire", huh. Unironically, I've been feeling that way.
Well, there was also a lot of unrelated things that happened as well around last November for me, but yes, getting into vibecoding for real was one of them, and man I feel physically drained coming back from work and going to use more AI.
Not sure what it is. I'm using AI personally to learn and bootstrap a lot of domain knowledge I never would have learned otherwise (even got into philosophy!, but man is it exhausting keeping up with AI. I would burn through a week's worth of credits in a day, and now I haven't vibe coded a week.
I think, I will chill. One day at a time.
AI Vampire is from Steve Yegge, credit where it's due.
My take is that it's similar to what Amber Case described in Calm Technology - with AI you are not steering one car, you're really steering three cars at the same time. The human mind isn't really designed for that.
I am finding that really structuring my time helps in terms of fighting back. And adopting an hours restriction, even if I could rage for 4 more hours, I don't. Instead I stop and go outside.
AI Vampire is so perfect. Ive never thought of it that way but its right there.
AI is starting to look like a net negative for humanity. I remember the early days of OpenAI. I was super excited about it. There was a new space to uncover and learn about. I was hopeful.
Now I have this love/hate relationship with it. Claude Code is amazing. I use it everyday because it makes me so much more efficient at my job. But I also know that by using it I’m contributing to making my job redundant one day.
At the same time I see how much resources we are wasting on AI. And to what end? Does anybody really buy the BS that this will all make the world a better place one day? So many people we could shelter and feed, but instead we are spending it on trying to make your computer check and answer your emails for you. At what point do we just look up and ask… what is the damn purpose of all of this? I guess money.
> But I also know that by using it I’m contributing to making my job redundant one day.
I don't see how this is the case if you're anything more than a junior engineer... it unlocks so many possibilities. You can do so much more now. We are more limited by our ideas at this point than anything else.
Why is the reaction of so many people, once their menial work gets automated, "oh no, my menial work is automated." Why is it not "sweet, now I can do bigger/better/more ambitious things?"
(You can go on about corporate culture as the cause, but I've worked at regular corporations and most of FAANG. Initiative is rewarded almost everywhere.)
> Does anybody really buy the BS that this will all make the world a better place one day?
Why is it BS? I'm shocked that anyone with a love and passion for technology can feel this way. Have you not seen the long history of automation and what it has brought humanity?
There is a reason that we aren't dying of dysentery at the ripe age of 45 on some peasant field after a hard winter day's worth of hard labor. The march of automation and technology has already "made the world a better place."
Keep marching that automation and tehcnology to an acidified ocean. But hey, at least now we can code faster than we can review!
AI won't be what acidifies our ocean, but AGI might save us from it.
Strangely enough, I don't see you calling to end the consumption of meat which would have a far larger environmental impact while not slowing global progress at all.
> AI won't be what acidifies our ocean
Tech is what got us where we are. AI allows us to use more energy to produce more of what is currently measurably killing us.
> but AGI might save us from it.
This is just faith. Some believe that prayers may save us.
"AI energy usage" is a convenient scapegoat not backed by data.
Many things are orders of magnitude bigger than AI in the energy usage problem that bring less comparable value.
And I’m shocked that anyone into tech can be so blind to the adverse effects the current tech industry is having on our world and our society.
We owe it to the world, as the experts, to be critical. The march of automation and technology has made the world a better place in some ways. I sure love modern medicine, but those drones flying over Ukraine and Russia sure don’t seem like they are making the world a better place. Nuclear bombs are not making the work a better place. Misinformation in social media is not making the world a better place.
Any belief you drink blindly will eventually find a way to harm you.
Oh yeah, no you are right. Sorry for focusing on that little part of space and time where I and everyone I know and love is alive and being affected by our decisions. How dumb of me!
It actually is genuinely wrong to prioritize your little bit of space and time over the needs of the species as a whole and the benefit of untold future billions.
If everyone thought like you we'd be stuck in the pre-Industrial phase. How miserable that would be!
>Why is the reaction of so many people, once their menial work gets automated, "oh no, my menial work is automated." Why is it not "sweet, now I can do bigger/better/more ambitious things?"
because i have rent to pay? old age to prepare for?
why is it so hard to understand most people are not rich, that the cost of living is high, and that most people are VERY afraid their jobs will be automated away? why is so hard to understand that most people haven't worked at FAANG, they don't have stocks or savings, and are squeezed harder with every new day and every new war?
what world, what reality are you guys living in?!
Because there is always work to do. It is true that demand will drop for those that don't take initiative and aren't sure what to do now that AI can do their repetitive tasks. However, demand will surge for those that can think critically about how to utilize AI to empower businesses.
"Software engineer" as a profession is rapidly getting automated at my company, and yet our SWEs are delivering more value than ever before. The layer of abstraction has changed, that is all.
> what world, what reality are you guys living in?!
One that has seen immense benefits from the Industrial Revolution and previous waves of automation.
> I don't see how this is the case if you're anything more than a junior engineer... it unlocks so many possibilities.
I really don't understand this way of thinking. Don't you think that AI could replace senior engineers? Sure, companies will be able to do bigger / better / more ambitious stuff - but without any software engineers.
> Why is it BS? I'm shocked that anyone with a love and passion for technology can feel this way. Have you not seen the long history of automation and what it has brought humanity?
I definitely think that AI will be a net benefit for society but it could easily end up being be bad for me.
So far AI doesn't seem even close to replacing senior engieeners. Hell, it can't even replace junior engieeners entirely.
I use AI agents every day at work and I'm happy with that, but it took over two years and billions of dollars in investment to deliver anything useful (Claude Code et al). The current models are amazing, but they still randomly make mistakes that even a junior wouldn't make.
There's another paradigm shift to be made certainly, because currently it feels like we scaled up a bug brain to spit out code. It works great for some problems, but it's not what software developers usually do at work.
Well, on the other hand, software isn’t all about checking emails.
I know someone who worked for a nonprofit that made pregnancy health software that worked over text messaging. Its clients were women in Africa who didn’t have much, but they had a cell phone, so they could get reminders, track vitals, and so forth.
They had to find enough funding to pay several software engineers to build and maintain that system. If AI allows a single person to do it, at much lower cost, is that bad?
I really like this paragraph about management caring about AI:
> What makes this worse, is our bosses have bought into it this time too. My managers never cared much about database technologies, IDE’s or javascript frameworks; they just wanted the feature so they could sell it. Management seems to have stepped firmly and somewhat haphazardly into the implementation detail now. I reckon most of us have got some sort of company initiative to ‘use more AI’ in our objectives this year.