in the meantime im having lots of fun coding and using AI, reinventing every wheel i can. 0 stress cos i don't do it for money :). I think a lot of people are having a tantrum because programing is not sexy anymore, its getting easier, the bar is lower now , the quality is awful and nobody cares. its like any other boring soul crushing job.

also if you want to see the real cost (at least part of it) of AI coding or the whole fucked up IT industry, go to any mining town in the global south.

> Fast forward to today, and that joy of coding is decreasing rapidly. Well, I’m a manager these days, so there’s that… But even when I do get technical, I usually just open Cursor and prompt my way out of 90% of it. It’s way more productive, but more passive as well.

Dude's an engineering manager who codes maybe 5% of the time and his joy is decreasing. AI is not the problem, it's being an engineering manager.

The catch is that when AI handles 95% or 99% of a task, people say great, don't need humans. 99% is great.

But when that last 1% breaks and AI can’t fix it. That’s where you need the humans.

Earlier this year, a hackernews started quizzing me about the size and scope of the projects I worked on professionally, with the implication that I couldn't really be working on anything large or complex -- that I couldn't really be doing serious development, without using a full-fat IDE like IntelliJ. I wasn't going to dox myself or my professional work just so he could reach a conclusion he's already arrived at. The point is, to this person, beyond a certain complexity threshold -- simple command-line tools, say -- an IDE was a must, otherwise you were just leaving productivity on the table.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42511441

People are going to be making the same judgements about AI-assisted coding in the near future. Sure, you could code everything yourself for your own personal enrichment, or simply because it's fun. But that will be a pursuit for your own time. In the realm of business, it's a different story: you are either proompting, or you're effectively stealing money from your employer because you're making suboptimal use of the tools available. AI gets you to something working in production so much faster that you'd be remiss not to use it. After all, as Milt and Tim Bryce have shown, the hard work in business software is in requirements analysis and design; programming is just the last translation step.

The post focuses on flow, but depending on what you mean by it, it isn't necessarily a good thing. Trying to solve something almost too difficult usually gets you out of flow. You still need concentration, though.

My main worry about AI is that people just keep using the garbage that exists instead of trying to produce something better, because AI takes away much of the pain of interacting with garbage. But most people are already perfectly fine using garbage, so probably not much will change here.

I think a lot of this discussion is moot - it all devolves into the same arguments rehashed between people who like using AI and people who do not.

What we really need are more studies on the productivity and skill outcomes of using AI tools. Microsoft did one, with results that were very negative towards AI tools [1]. I would like to see more (and much larger cohort) studies along this line, whether they validate Microsoft's conclusions or oppose them.

Personally I do not find AI coding tools to be useful at all - but I have not put extensive time into developing a "skillset" to use them optimally. Mainly because I believe, similar to what the study by MS found, that they are detrimental to my critical reasoning skills. If this turns out to be wrong, I would not mind evaluating changing course on that decision - but we need more data.

1. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/...

Would you be happier and feel more flow if you were typing in assembly? What about hand-punching cards? To me this reads more as nostalgia than a genuine concern. Tools are always increasing in abstraction, but there’s no reason you can’t achieve flow with new tools. Learning to prompt is the new learning to type.

So if I'm understanding this, there are two central arguments being made here.

1. AI Coding leads to a lack of flow.

2. A lack of flow leads to a lack of joy.

Personally, I can't find myself agreeing with the first argument. Flow happens for me when I use AI. It wouldn't surprise me if this differed developer to developer. Or maybe it is the size of requests I'm making, as mine tend to be on the smaller size where I already have an idea of what I want to write but think the AI can spit it out faster. I also don't really view myself as prompt engineering; instead it feels more like a natural back and forth with the AI to refine the output I'm looking for. There are times it gets stubborn and resistant to change but that is generally a sign that I might want to reconsider using AI for that particular task.

My experience has been almost the opposite.

Typing isn't the fun part of it for me. It's a necessary evil to realize a solution.

The fun part of being an engineer for me is figuring out how it all should work and fit together. Once that's done - I already basically have all of the code for the solution in my head - I've just got to get it out through my fingers and slog through all the little ways it isn't quite right, doesn't satisfy x or y best practice, needs to be reshaped to accommodate some legacy thing it has to integrate that is utterly uninteresting to me, etc.

In the old model, I'd enjoy the first few hours or days of working on something as I was designing it in my mind, figuring out how it was all going to work. Then would come the boring part. Toiling for days or weeks to actually get all the code just so and closing that long-tail gap from 90% done (and all interesting problems solved) to 100% done (and all frustrating minutia resolved).

AI has dramatically reduced the amount of time the unsatisfying latter part of a given effort lasts for me. As someone with high-functioning ADD, I'm able to stay in the "stimulation zone" of _thinking_ about the hard / enjoyable part of the problem and let AI do (50-70%, depending on domain / accuracy) of the "typing toil".

Really good prompts that specify _exactly_ what I want (in technical terms) are important and I still have to re-shape, clean up, correct things - but it's vastly different than it was before AI.

I'm seeing on the horizon an ability to materialize solutions as quickly as I can think / articulate - and that to me is very exciting.

I will say that I am ruthlessly pragmatic in my approach to development, focusing on the most direct solution to meet the need. For those that obsesses over beautiful, elegant code - personalizing their work as a reflection of their soul / identity or whatever, I can see how AI would suck all the joy from the process. Engineering vs. art, basically. AI art sucks and I expect that's as true for code as it is for anything else.

Funny that I found this article going to hacker news as a pause in my work : I had to chose between using Aider or my brain to code a small algorithmic task, sorting items of a list based on dependences between items written in a YAML file.

Using Aider would probably solve the task in 5 minutes. Coding it in 30 minutes. The former choice would result in more time for other tasks or reading HN or having a hot beverage or walking in the sun. The second would challenge my rusting algorithmic skills and give me a better understanding of what I'm doing for the medium term.

Hard choice. In any case, I have a good salary, even with the latter option I can decide to spend good times.

It's 9am in the morning. I login to my workstation and muddle my way through the huge enterprise code base which doesn't fit into any model context window for the AI tool to be useful (and even if it did, we can't use any random model due to compliance and proprietary and whatnot).

I have thousands deadlines which are suddenly coming due and a bunch of code which is broken because some poor soul under the same pressure put something that "works" in. And it worked, until it didn't, and now it's my turn in the barrel.

Is this the joy?

I'm not complaining, I'm doing it for the good money.

I found myself recently making decent superficial progress only to introduce a bug and had a system crash (unusual bc it’s python) bc I didn’t really understand how the package worked (bc I bypassed the docs for the AI examples). It did end up working out ok - I then went into the weeds and realised the AI has given me two examples that worked in isolation but not together - inconsistent API calls essentially. I do like understanding what I’m doing as much or more than getting it done, bc it always comes back to you, sooner or later.

>"...the one thing that currently worries me most about using AI for software development: lack of joy."

I struggled with this at first too. But it just becomes another kind of joy. Think of it like jogging versus riding a motorcycle. Jogging is fun, people enjoy it, and they always will. But flying down a canyon road at 90MPH and racing through twists and turns is... way more fun. Once you've learned how to do it. But there's a gap there in which it stops being fun until you do.

The things I'm usually tabbing through in cursor are not the things that make me feel a lot of enjoyment in your work. The things that are most enjoyable are usually the system level design aspects, the refactorings to make things work better. These you can brainstorm with AI, but cannot delegate to AI today.

The rest is glorified boilerplate that I find usually saps me of my energy, not gives me energy. I'm a fan of anything that can help me skip over that and get to the more enjoyable work.

“ Fast forward to today, and that joy of coding is decreasing rapidly. Well, I’m a manager these days, so there’s that…”

This sounds a more likely reason for losing your joy if your passion is coding.

Honestly, most of the "real engineer" rhetoric is exhausting. Here's the thing: the people most obsessed with software craftsmanship, pattern orthodoxy, and layered complexity often create some of the most brittle, hostile, constantly mutating systems imaginable. You may be able to build abstractions, but if you're shipping stuff that users have to re-learn every quarter because someone needed to justify a promotion via another UI revamp or tech stack rewrite, you're not designing well. You're just changing loudly.

Also, stop gatekeeping AI tooling like it’s cheating. We’re not in a craft guild. The software landscape is full of shovelware and half-baked “best practices” that change more often than a JavaScript framework’s logo. I'm not here to honor the tradition of suffering through YAML hell or memorizing the 400 ways to configure a build pipeline. I’m here to make something work well, fast, and that includes leveraging AI like the power tool it is.

So yeah, you can keep polishing the turd pile of over-engineered “real” systems. The rest of us will be using AI to build, test, and ship faster than your weekly stand-up even finishes.

Typing isn't what makes programming fun.

AI coding preserves flow more than legacy coding. You never have to go read documentation for an hour. You can continuously code.

As a scientist, I actually greatly enjoy the AI assisted coding because it can help with the boring/tedious side of coding. I.e. I occasionally have some new ideas/algorithms to try, and previously I did not have enough time to explore them out, because there was just too much boring code to be written. Now this part is essentially solved, and I can more easily focus on key algorithms/new ideas.

I had a lot of joy making an experimental DSL with a web server runtime using primarily LLM tools.

Then I shared it on HN and was subject to literal harassment.

> if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Like pronouncing your surname? Holy hell.

Ok, I needed to get that off my chest, will go back to reading the article now.

Have you encounter anything regarding tech debt when using AI?

Don't see any mention regarding this in the post, which is the common objection people have regarding vibe coding.

To make things good, still takes a bunch of work - though I don't know if it's all the satisfying work.

One of the things people often overlook don't talk about in this arguments is the manager's point of view and how it's contributing to the shakeups in this industry.

As a developer I'm bullish on coding agents and GenAI tools, because they can save you time and can augment your abilities. I've experienced it, and I've seen it enough already. I love them, and want to see them continue to be used.

I'm bearish on the idea that "vibe coding" can produce much of value, and people without any engineering background becoming wildly productive at building great software. I know I'm not alone. If you're a good problem solver who doesn't know how to code, this is your gateway. And you better learn what's happening with the code while you can to avoid creating a huge mess later on.

Developers argue about the quality of "vibe coded" stuff. There are good arguments on both sides. At some point I think we all agree that AI will be able generate high quality software faster than a human, someday. But today is not that day. Many will try to convince you that it is.

Within a few years we'll see massive problems from AI generated code, and it's for one simple reason:

Managers and other Bureaucrats do not care about the quality of the software.

Read it again if you have to. It's an uncomfortable idea, but it's true. They don't care about your flow. They don't care about how much you love to build quality things. They don't care if software is good or bad they care about closing tickets and creating features. Most of them don't care, and have never cared about the "craft".

If you're a master mason crafting amazing brickwork, you're exactly the same as some amateur grabbing some bricks from home depot and slapping a wall together. A wall is a wall. That's how the majority of managers view software development today. By the time that shoddy wall crumbles they'll be at another company anyway so it's someone else's problem.

When I talk about the software industry collapsing now, and in a few years we're mired with garbage software everywhere, this is why. These people in "leadership" are salivating at the idea of finally getting something for nothing. Paying a few interns to "vibe code" piles of software while they high five each other and laugh.

It will crash. The bubble will pop.

Developers: Keep your skills sharp and weather out the storm. In a few years you'll be in high demand once again. When those walls crumble, they will need people who what they're doing to repair it. Ask for fair compensation to do so.

Even if I'm wrong about all of this I'm keeping my skills sharp. You should too.

This isn't meant to be anti-management, but it's based on what I've seen. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

* And to the original point, In my experience the tools interrupt the "flow" but don't necessarily take the joy out of it. I cannot do suggestion/autocomplete because it breaks my flow. I love having a chat window with AI nearby when I get stuck or want to generate some boilerplate.

A related thought, just leaving this here.

There's something great about old technology (though obviously one must be aware of survivorship bias when citing such technology), despite the fact that, logically speaking, new technology should have obviously been better.

Perhaps it's some variant of Jevons' paradox. The better / more efficient things get, the more of an impetus there is to use them in truly crappy ways. And this is how I'm starting to feel about programming with vs without an AI: you can either program manually to create truly creative, functional, elegant stuff, or use AI to produce garbage more efficiently. There just doesn't seem to be an in-between category, at least in terms of demand.

In case you haven't seen this video of a toaster from the 60s before, you're in for a treat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1OfxlSG6q5Y

I'm also reminded of Edsger Dijkstra's quote on elegance: https://platosmirror.com/edsger-dijkstra-elegance-is-not-a-d...

The old joy may be gone. But the new joy is there, if you're receptive to it

I’m the opposite. Tabbing through boilerplate increases my flow.

Hard disagree.

I've been an engineering manager and it's a lot easier to make useful decisions that your team find credible if you can keep your toes in the water just a little bit.

My golden rule is to stay out of the critical path of shipping a user-facing feature: if a product misses a deadline because the engineering manager slipped on their coding commitments, that's bad.

The trick is to use your minimal coding time for things that are outside of that critical path: internal tools, prototypes, helping review code to get people unstuck, that kind of thing.

I think you don't look down at the product of AI, only the process that created it. Clearly the craft that created the object has become less creative, less innovative. Now it's just a variation on a theme. Does such work really deserve the same level of recognition as befitted Beethoven for his Ninth or Robert Bolt for his "A Man for all Seasons"?

> I don't know his exact job, but if it involves programming, or even scripting, he is faking his way with AI, not understanding what he's doing. That is frightening.

That could be considered malpractice. I know our profession currently doesn't have professional standards, but it's just a side effect of it being very new and not yet solidified; it won't be long until some duty of care becomes required, and we're already starting to see some movement in that direction, with things like the EU CRA.

Sure, but they also shouldn't claim they're potters because they went to Pottery Barn.

Sounds like Communist Albania where everybody had to be able to repair the car and take it apart and put it back together to own one

AI generated tests are genuinely fantastic, if you treat them like any other AI generated code and review them thoroughly.

I've been writing Python for 20+ years and I still can't use unittest.mock without looking up the details every time. ChatGPT and Claude are great at that, which means I use it more often because I don't have to deal with the frustration of figuring it out.

Just as with anything else AI, you never accept test code without reviewing it. And often it needs debugging. But it handles about 90% of it correctly and saves a lot of time and aggravation.

Well, maybe they just need X lines of so-called "tests" to satisfy some bullshit-job metrics.

Worse, it feels productive. But I'd bet if you watched the clock and tracked progress of a non-trivial project, you'd find what we've always known to be true: there are no shortcuts.

I'm sure it's faster in the short term. Just like copy-paste-from-stack-overflow is. But it is debt. The shit builds and builds. But I think the problem is we're so surrounded by shit we've just normalized it. It is incredible how much bloat and low hanging fruit there is that can be cheaply resolved but there is no will to. And in my experience, it isn't just a lack of will, it is a lack of recognition. If the engineers can't recognize shit, then how do we build anything better? It is literally our job to find problems

You know. I have my boilerplate in Rails and it is just a work of art... I simply clone my BP repo, bundle, migrate, run and I have user management, auth, smtp client, sms alerts, and literally everything I need to get started. And it was just this same week I decided to try a code assistant, and my result was shockingly good, once you provide the assistant with a good clean starting point, and if you are very clear on what you want to build, then the results are just too good to be dismissed.

So yes, boilerplate, but also yes, there is definitely something to be gained from using ai assistants.

I was speaking about solving people's problems generally. It's easy to find specific problems that are best addressed with software, just as it's easy to find specific problems that can't be addressed with software.

I don't even think you have to be on the frontier for LLMs to lose most of their effectiveness. Large legacy codebases with deeply ingrained tribal knowledge and loads of idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies will do the trick. Sad how most software projects end in this state.

Obviously LLMs in this situation will still be insanely helpful, but in the same way that Google searches or stack overflow is insanely helpful.

I'm an electrical engineer and work mostly with power electronics.

At my day job I have 3 programs written by LLM used in production. One written by GPT-4 (in spring 2023) and recently upgraded by gemini 2.5, and the other two by Claude 3.7

One is a automatic electronics test system that runs tests and collects measurements (50k+ readings across 8-12 channels)(GPT-4, now with a GUI and faster DB thanks to 2.5). One is a QC tool to help quickly make QC reports in our companies standard form (3.7). And the last is a GUI CAD tool for rendering and quickly working through ancient manufacturing automation scripts from the 80's/90's to bring them up to compatibility with modern automation tooling (3.7).

I personally think that there is a large gap between what programs are, and how each end user ultimately uses them. The programs are made with a vast scope, but often used narrowly by individuals. The proprietary CAD program that we were going to use originally for the old files was something like $12k/yr for a license. And it is a very powerful software package. But we just needed to do one relatively simple thing. So rather than buy the entire buffet, buy the entire restaurant, Claude was able to just make simple burger.

Would I put my name on these and sell to other companies? No. Am I confident other LLM junkies could generate similar strongly positive outcomes with bespoke narrow scope programs? Absolutely.

How long until it becomes the rule because of some arbitrary "productivity" metric? Sure, you may not be forced to use it, but you'll be fire for being "unproductive".

You write that like the latter is in opposition to the former. Yet the content suggests the latter is the former

You're welcome to believe what you will, but the fact is I've written code that serves a purpose and provides value to those businesses, and at the end of the day that's is all that matters, not some arbitrary purity test you just made up.

The purpose of programming is to provide value for people, not to read documents.

The inertia argument is real, and I would compare it to the mistaken believe of some at IBM in the 1970s that SQL would be used by managers to query relational databases directly, so no programming was needed anymore.

And what happened? Programmers make the queries and embed them into code that creates dashboards that managers look at. Or managers ask analysts who have to interpret the dashboards for them... It rather created a need for more programmers.

Compare embedded SQL with prompts - SQL queries compared to assembler or FORTRAN code is closer to English prose for sure. Did it take some fun away? Perhaps, if manually traversing a network database is fun to anyone, instead of declaratively specifying what set of data to retrieve. But it sure gave new fun to people who wanted to see results faster (let's call them "designers" rather than "coders"), and it made programming more elegant due to the declarativity of SQL queries (although that is cancelled out again by the ugliness of mixing two languages in the code).

Maybe the question is: Does LLM-based coding enable a new kind of higher level "design flow" to replace "coding flow"? (Maybe it will make a slightly different group of people happy?)

I mean, the training data also has a cutoff date and changed beyond that are not reflected in the code suggestions.

Also, I know that people love to joke on modern software and JS in particular. But if you take react code from 2020 and drop it into a new react codebase it still works. Even class based components work. Yes, if you jumped on the newest framework bandwagon every time stuff will break all the time, but AI won’t be able to help you with that either. If you went for relatively stable frameworks, you can re use boilerplate completely or with relatively minimal adjustments

  This code needs to be upgraded to the new
  recommended JavaScript library from
  Google. Figure out what that is and
  then look up enough documentation to
  port this code to it

lol, I've been cutting and pasting from the same projects I started in 2010. When you work in vanilla js it doesn't change.

Ehh most people are good about at least throwing a warning before they break a legacy pattern. And you can also just use old versions of your tools. I'm sure the 2021 tool still does the job. Most people aren't working on the bleeding edge here. Old versions of numpy are fine.

Each activity we engage in has different use, value, and subjective enjoyment to different people. Some people love knitting! Personally, I do know how to sew small tears, which is more than most people in the US these days.

Just because I utilize the services of others for some things does not mean that it should be expected I want to utilize the service of others for all things.

This is a preposterous generalization and exactly why I said the OP premise is laughable.

Further, you’ve shifted OP’s point from subjective enjoyment of an activity to getting “paid well” - this is an irrelevant tangent to whether “most” people in general would delegate work if they could.

That's interesting, especially wrt the Rust example. I actually like LLMs as reference docs, I just don't trust their code as far as I can throw it.

Thanks for the follow-up!

My work is the magical stuff, I don’t write much code outside of work, I don’t have time with two young kids.

Unfortunately, I'm at a stage of personal life where I do not have time to blog. I'd love to but :(

The stuff I work on for company is confidential and even getting authorization to use AI was such a hassle.

Based on some of your replies, I think you have an impression of current generation AIs that is 100% wrong. I can not blame you as the impression you have, is what the AI companies want you to have, that's what they are hyping.

In another comment, you mentioned someone should demo how AI can add a non-leaf feature to a non-trivial LOC codebase. This is what AI companies say AI can do. But the truth is, (current gen) AIs can not do this except a few rare cases. I can not demo this to you as I can't do this and do not attempt to do it either on day to day tasks.

The issue is context. What you are asking requires AI to have a huge amount of context that it simply is not equipped to handle (at least not right now).

What AIs are really good at is to do small fragment of a task given enough clear requirements.

When I want AI to write a Handler in my Controller, I don't just ask it to "write a function to handle POST call for entity E."

I write the javadoc /* */ comment that defines the signature and explains a little about how the core process of this handling works. I can even copy/paste similar handler from another controller if I think that will help.

Ultimately, my brain already knows the input, output and key transformations that needs to happen in this function. I just write minimal amount (esp comments) and get AI to complete the rest.

So if I need to write a non-leaf feature, I will break it down to several leaf features and then pass it on to AI and if needed, manually assemble them.

I had to write 500LOC bash script to handle a software deployment. This is not the way to do it but I was forced by circumstances created by someone else. Anyways, if I had to write the whole thing by hand, it'd take multiple days as bash syntax is not forgiving and the stuff I needed to do in the script were quite complex/crazy (and stupid).

I think I wrote about 50+ lines of text describing the whole process, which you can think of as a requirement document.

With a few tries, I was able to get the whole script with near accuracy. My reading revealed some issues. Pointed them to AI. It fixed them. Tests revealed some other issues. Again, AI fixed them after pointing out. I was able to get the whole thing done in just an hour or so.

Yeah, I think that's pretty common. It took me 15+ years of my own career before I got over my aversion to spending significant amounts of time reading through code that I didn't write myself.

We all do. But more often than not we have to learn to do surgical incisions in order to do our task for the day. It's what truly distinguishes a professional.

Ah, I absolutely don't verify code in the mathematical sense of the word. More like utilize strong static typing (or hints / linters in weaker typed languages) and write a lot of tests.

Nothing is truly 100% safe or free of bugs. What I meant with my comment up-thread was that I have enough experience to have a fairly quick and critical eye of code, and that has saved my skin many times.

> flawed enough starting premise

That's where we start to disagree what future looks like, then.

It's not there yet, in that the LLM-clone isn't good enough. But amusingly a not nearly good enough clone of me already made me more productive, in that I'm able to deliver more while maintaining the same level of personal satisfaction with my code.

Depends on the language. Python for instance has a massive default library, and there are entire modules I use anywhere from one a year to once a decade —- or never at all until some new project needs them.

Not everyone works in a single language and/or deep in some singular code base.

> If you love coding and you hate AI, you're probably more committed to some sort of ideology than you are the love of technology.

As someone that you may characterize as one of these people, I can share some perspective.

First, I would question the premise that “love of technology” is not itself an ideology.

I do love technology, but not for its own sake. I love solving problems, I love tinkering, and I love craftsmanship and invention.

But technology can also be dangerous, it can set us backwards and not forwards, and its progress is never as inevitable as its evangelists claim. You need to view technology with a critical eye, and remember that tools are tools, and not panaceas.

So I guess I’d ask you — what’s so wrong with choosing to live in a cabin in the woods without a cellphone?

> throw your cellphone into the river and find a nice cabin in the woods somewhere

Would that I could...

How is using Claude over Llama benefitting corporations over workers? I work with AI every day and sum total of my token spend across all providers is less than a single NVidia H100 card I'd have to buy (from a pretty big corporation!), at the very least, for comparable purpose?

How are self-hosted LLMs not copying the work of millions without compensating them for it?

How is the push for more productivity through better technology somehow bad?

I am pro FOSS but can't understand this comment.

> just like those Assembly developers thought compiling via Assembly text generation and feeding into an Assembly would still be around

Confused by what you mean. Is this not the case?

I have been working in IT for 5 years while being a professional musician for 8 years (in France and touring in Europe). I've never met a single singer who told me they hate singing, on other hand, I can't even count how many of my colleagues told me how much they hate coding.

Another analogy would be with sound engineering. I've met sound engineer who hate their job as they would rather play music. They are also the ones whose jobs are likely to be replaced by AI. And I would argue that the argument stand stills. AI Sound Engineers who hate working on sound are often the bad sound engineers.

> I think the analogy/ substitution falls apart in that singing is generally not very stable or lucrative (for 99.999% of singers), so it is pretty rare to find someone singing who hates it.

I tried to cover this particular case with:

> And while it is easier to become good at coding than at singing - for professional purposes at least - I believe that the effect still holds.

---

> Yes, loving something is no guarantee of skill at it, but hating something is very likely to correspond to not being good at it, since skills take time and dedication to hone. Being bad at something is the default state.

I tried to cover this particular case with:

> It is of course positively correlated with it.

---

> Being bad at something is the default state.

Well, skill-wise yes. But being talented at something can happen, even when you hate something.

> And I think we do tend to (rightfully) look down on e.g. singers who lip-sync concerts or use autotune to sing at pitches they otherwise can't, nevermind how we'd react if one used AI singing instead of themselves.

Autotune is de rigueur for popular music.

In general, I'm not sure that I agree with looking down on people.

What context did I skip? It seems like the statement stands on its own.

It depends on the language. Javascript is fine without semicolons until it isn't. Of course, a linter will solve this more reliably than AI.

By knowing about libraries that I don't have to read and learn and being able to glue them together to quickly accomplish my task.

Exactly, thank you!

This morning I made this while sipping coffee, and it solves a real problem for my gf: https://github.com/kirubakaran/xmldiffer Sure it's not enormous, and it was built from scratch, but imho it's not a trivial thing either. It would've taken me at least a day or two of full time work, and I certainly don't have a couple of days to spare on a task like this. Instead, pair programming with AI made it into a fun relaxing activity.

"but most work tasks I'm given are fairly boring"

Part of the joy of craft is the actual process of building a thing, even if the thing you're build is itself "boring". One of my clients right now is a React/Next.js app, which in terms of architecture I find deeply problematic (I tend to advocate vanilla JS, web components, close-to-browser-metal approaches, etc.)—but I still find ways to enjoy the work I do and furthermore I'm proud of the work that I do. I find it anathema that I'd offload any of that craft to a synthetic code text extruder.

But 1 million tokens is like 50k lines of code or something. That's only medium sized. How does that help with large complex codebases?

What tools are you guys using? Are there none that can interactively probe the project in a way that a human would, e.g. use code intelligence to go-to-definition, find all references and so on?

  llm -m openai/o3 \
    -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonw/llm-hacker-news/refs/heads/main/llm_hacker_news.py \
    -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonw/tools/refs/heads/main/github-issue-to-markdown.html \
    -s 'Write a new fragments plugin in Python that registers issue:org/repo/123 which fetches that issue
        number from the specified github repo and uses the same markdown logic as the HTML page to turn that into a fragment'

The output of the LLM is probabilistic. The code you actually commit or merge is not.

So what? I know most compilers are deterministic, but it really only matters for reproducible builds, not that you're actually going to reason about the output. And the language makes few guarantees about the resulting instructions.

Yet the words you chose to use in this comment were entirely modelled inside your brain in a not so different manner.

> I can't run 80 mph but I can drive a car that fast

If you drive a car 80mph you don't get to claim you are a good runner

Similarly if you use an LLM to generate 10k lines of code, you don't get to claim you are a good programmer

Regardless of the outcome being the "same"

> I can't run 80 mph but I can drive a car that fast, its my tool to get the job done.

Right, but if you use a chess engine to win a chess championship or if you use a motor to win a cycling championship, you would be disqualified because getting the job done is not the point of the exercise.

Art is (or should be) about establishing dialogues and connections between humans. To me, auto-generated art it's like choosing between seeing a phone picture of someone's baby and a stock photo picture of a random one - the second one might "get the job done" much better, but if there's no personal connection then what's the point?

Seriously, I see this claim thrown around as though everyone writes the same starting template 50 times a week. Like, if you've got a piece of "boilerplate" code you're constantly rewriting... Save It! Put it in a repo or a snippet somewhere that you can just copy-paste when you need it.

You don't need a multi-million dollar LLM to give you slightly different boilerplate snippets when you already have a text editor on your computer to save them.

The documentation are for answering your questions, it’s not a puzzle to be solved. Using the reference docs assumes that you already have an understanding about the thing that is being documented and you’re looking for specificity or details. If not, the correct move is to go through a book, a tutorial, or the user guide. Aka the introductory materials.

> It is a stubborn refusal to see that one could be programming something much more sophisticated if they could use these iteration loops efficiently

Programming something more sophisticated with AI? AI is pretty much useless if you're doing anything somewhat novel. What it excels at is vomiting code that has already been written a million times so you can build yet another Electron cross-platform app.

I hate IT, will pick literally anything else to work at, but the money is an issue.

You don't. That's why you don't use an LLM most of the time. I was talking about cases where either the tasks were too boring or required an expertise that I didn't have at the time.

Thought it was obvious.

Did you skip the "rigorously verify the LLM code" part of my comment on purpose, just to show contempt?

> it's a collosal waste of my time

> LLM can do it faster, better, and cost me near nothing.

And this is one the thing I'm skeptical about. The above use case is a symptom of all code and no design. It is a waste of time because you're putting yourself in a corner, architecture wise. Kinda like building on a crooked foundation.

I've never done refactoring where I'm writing a lot of code, it's mostly just copy-paste and rebuilding the connection between modules (functions, classes, files, packages,...). And if the previous connections were well understood and you have a clear plan for the new design, then it's a no-brainer to get there. Same when adapting code, I'm mostly deleting lines and renaming variables (regex is nice).

Maybe I'm misunderstanding things, but unless it's for small scripts or very common project types, I haven't seen the supposed productivity gain compared to traditional tooling.

Maybe all code is boilerplate for them? I use libraries and frameworks exactly for the truly boilerplate part. But I still try to understand those code I depends on, as some times I want to deviate from the defaults. Or the bug might be in there.

It’s when you try to use an exotic language, you realize the amount of work that has been done to minimize dev time in more mainstream languages.

Right, just how the assembler spits out machine code that other people figured out for you, so you don't even understand the result.

Good artists copy, great artists steal

I very much understand the result of code that it writes. But I have never gotten paid to code. I get paid to use my knowledge of computers and the industry to save the company money or to make the company money.

Do you feel the same way when you delegate assignments to more junior developers and they come back with code?

This is really interesting to me.

Do you love coding, or do you love creating programs?

It seems like the latter given your metaphor being a microphone to make you seem like you could sing well, i.e. wanting the end state itself rather than the achievement via the process.

"wanted to sound like him" vs "wanted to sing like him"

> To extend your metaphor: AI is like a magic microphone that makes all of my singing sound like Tony Rice, my personal favorite singer. I’ve always wanted to sound like him - but I never will. I don’t have the range or the training. But AI allows my coding level to get to that corresponding level with writing software.

My experience with LLMs leads me to believe that it's more likely that the magic microphone in this case makes you sound still very, very bad, but being that you're not a good singer you can't tell the difference between very, very bad and Tony Rice's singing. You sang the song, though, i.e. the solution was reached.

They certainly are for me, working but horribly designed java projects done by plsql devs were a proper eyeballs bleeding long into the night.

Absolutely 0 framework or libs, nothing even for logging. Code architecture that would be left in the dust by most university semester projects.

This is how plsql codebases look, but boy Java (and rest of the world) moved quite far since 1995.

All major tokenisers have explicit support for encoding arbitrary byte sequences. There's usually a consecutive range of tokens reserved for 0x00 to 0xFF, and you can encode any novel UTF-8 words or structures with it. Including emoji and characters that weren't a part of the model's initial training, if you show it some examples.

Why stop there? Just have it spit out the state of the bits on the hardware. English seems like a serious shackle for an LLM.

Kind of, but character-based tokens make it a lot harder and more expensive to learn semantics.

How did you get there from me agreeing 100% with someone who said that you should be ready to verify everything an LLM does for you and if you're not willing to do that you shouldn't use them at all?

Do you ever read my comments, or do you just imagine what I might have said and reply to that?

> How if it hallucinate and gives you wrong code

Then the code won't compile, or more likely your editor/IDE will say that it's invalid code. If you're using something like Cursor in agent mode, if invalid code is generated then it gets detected and the LLM keeps re-running until something is valid.

> It is better to read documentations and tutorials first.

I "trust" LLM's more than tutorials, there's so much garbage out there. For documentation, if the LLM suggests something, you can see the docstrings in your IDE. A lot of the time that's enough. If not, I usually go read the implementation if I _actually_ care about how something works, because you can't always trust documentation either.

Do you mean the laconic and incomplete documentation? And the tutorials that range from "here's how you do a hello world" to "draw the rest of the fucking owl" [0], with nothing in between to actually show you how to organise a code base or file structure for a mid-level project?

Hallucinations are a thing. With a competent human on the other end of the screen, they are not such an issue. And the benefits you can reap from having LLMs as a sometimes-mistaken advisory tool in your personal toolbox are immense.

[0]: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-to-draw-an-owl

Fair question. So far I've seen two things:

1. Code doesn't compile. This case is obvious on what to do.

2. Code does compile.

I don't work in Cursor, I read the code quick, to see the intent. And when done with that decide to copy/paste it and test the output.

You can learn a lot by simply reading the code. For example, when I see in polars a `group_by` function call but I didn't know polars could do that, now I know because I know SQL. Then I need to check the output, if the output corresponds to what I expect a group by function to do, then I'll move on.

There comes a point in time where I need more granularity and more precision. That's the moment where I ditch the AI and start to use things such as documentation and my own mind. This happens one to two hours after bootstrapping a project with AI in a language/library/framework I initially knew nothing about. But now I do, I know a few hours worth of it. That's enough to roughly know where everything is and not be in setup hell and similar things. Moreover, by just reading the code, I get a rough idea on how beginner to intermediate programmers think about the problem space the code is written in as there's always a certain style of writing certain code. This points me into the direction on how to think about it. I see it as a hint, not as the definitive answer. I suspect that experts think differently about it, but given that I'm just a "few hours old" in the particular language/lib/framework, I think knowing all of this is already really amazing.

AI helps with quicker bootstrapping by virtue of reading code. And when it gets actually complicated and/or interesting, then I ditch it :)

What do you do if you "hallucinate" and write the wrong code? Or if the docs/tutorial you read is out of date or incorrect or for a different version than you expect?

That's not a jab, but a serious question. We act like people don't "hallucinate" all the time - modern software engineering devops is all about putting in guardrails to detect such "hallucinations".

Even when it hallucinates it still solves most of the unknown unknowns which is good for getting you unblocked. It's probably close enough to get some terms to search for.

Most tutorials fail to add meta info like the system they're using and versions of things, that can be a real pain.

What should I have done there? Tell it to make sure that it gives me all 10 objects I give it back? Tell it to not put brackets in the wrong place? This is a real question --- what would you have done?

I'm still spending less effort/time. A very significant amount.

I do write plenty of things myself. Sometimes, I ignore AI completely and write 100s of lines. Sometimes, I take copilot suggestions every other line, as I'm writing something "common" and copilot can "read" my mind. And sometimes, I write 100s of lines purely by prompting. It is a fine line when to do which; also depends on mood.

I am not worried about that as I spend hours everyday reading. I'm also the type of person who, when something is needed in a document, do not search for it using CTRL+F, but manually look thru it. It always takes more time but I also learn adjacent things to the topic I need.

And I never commit a single line from AI without reading and understanding it myself. So it might come up with 100 line solution for me, but I probably already know what I wanted and off chance it came up with something correct but in a way I did not know, I do read and learn it.

Ultimately, to me, the knowledge that I can !reset null in docker compose override is important. Remembering if it is !null reset or reset !null or !reset null (i.e., syntax) is not important. My offhand knowledge is not getting worse as I am constantly learning things; I just focus less on specific syntaxes or API signatures now.

You can apply the same argument with IDE. Almost all developers will fail to write proper JS/TS/Java etc without IDE help.

I have read somewhere, that LLMs are mostly helpful to junior developers.

Is it possible the person claiming success with all these languages/tools/technologies is just on a junior level and is subjectively correct but has no point of reference how fast coding is for seniors and how quality code looks like?

  A. They have no skills/exp to judge AI output
  B. They don't learn from sudden magical wall of code output
  C. They don't get to explore; thus don't learn.
  D. Ultimately, LLMs act as a bad drug to them that keeps them dependent and stagnant.
  E. LLMs are really good for higher end of senior devs. This also means, they don't need as many Juniors anymore and they don't mentor juniors much. This is the biggest loss for Juniors.

Not OP, it be comes natural and doesn't take a lot of time.

Anyway, if you want to, LLMs can today help with a ton of programming languages and frameworks. If you use any of the top 5 languages and it still doesn't work for you, either you're doing some esoteric work or you're doing it wrong.

I write code to solve problems for my own use or for my hobby electronics projects. Asking chatgpt to write a script is faster than reading the documentation of some python library.

Just last week it wrote me a whole application and gui to open a webpage at a specific time. Yeah it breaks after the first trigger but it works for what I need.

I can guess your background (and probably age) from this comment

I work with quite a few F100 companies. The actual amount of software most of them create is staggering. Tens of thousands of different applications. Most of it is low throughput and used by a small number of employees for a specific purpose with otherwise low impact to the business. This kind of stuff has been vibe coded long before there was AI around to do it for you.

At the same time human ran 'feature' applications like you're talking about often suffer from "let the programmer figure it out" problems where different teams start doing their own things.

How long ago was this? I'd be surprised to see Claude 3.7 Sonnet make a mistake of this nature.

Either way, when a model starts making dumb mistakes like that these days I start a fresh conversation (to blow away all of the bad tokens in the current one), either with that model or another one.

I often switch from Claude 3.7 Sonnet to o3 or o4-mini these days. I paste in the most recent "good" version of the thing we're working on and prompt from there.

You should have dropped the LLM, of course. They are not replacing us the programmers anytime soon. If they can be used as an enabler / booster, cool, if not, back to business as usual. You can only win here. You can't lose.

What is the connection to machine generated code? He designed the items manually and mass produced them.

No one objects to a human writing code and selling copies.

Apart from that, this is the commercial Picasso who loved money. His early pre-expressionist paintings are godlike in execution, even if someone else has painted a Pierrot before him.

Picasso also never said this, and this quote is about ideas, not automation.

It does the PR for me, too

It's a good question because I also hastily wrote that. You'll come to defer to the model on average when it comes to otherwise coin flip judgements you have make when you yourself are unsure. The model may not have any more information but you don't have any indication that it wouldn't and even suspect that it secretly does and this bias makes you trust the model and accept things that are ultimately bad in possibly ways that you'll not discover for a very long time because it is deep within a specific context.

> Yes, AI can suggest syntactically valid code that does the wrong thing

To be fair, I as a dev with ten or fifteen years experience I do that too. That's why I always have to through test the results of new code before pushing to production. People act as if using AI should remove that step, or alternatively, as if it suddenly got much more burdensome. But honestly it's the part that has changed least for me since adopting an AI in the loop workflow. At least the AIncan help with writing automated tests now which helps a bit.

Why should I have a junior developer who is going to do negative work instead of poaching a mid developer who is probably underpaid since salary compression and inversion are real?

As a manager, say I do hire a junior developer, invest time into them and they level up. I go to the HR department and tell them that they deserve a 30% raise to bring them inline with the other mid level developers.

The HR department is going to say that’s out of policy and then the developer jumps ship.

You presume I work for a company!

yes, that is one aspect of it.

1) refactoring. copy paste, re-arrange, extract, delete and rebuild the connection. i have the mental model and tell the LLM do do it across multiple files or classes. does it way faster and exactly how i would do it given the right prompt which is just a huge file that dictates how things are structured, style, weird edge cases i encountered as time goes on.

2) new features or sections based on existing. i have a service class and want to duplicate and wire up different sections across domains. not easy enough to just be templated, but LLM can do it and understand the nuances. again, generate multiple files across classes no problem.

i can do all these things "fast". i can do them even faster when using the LLM, it offloads the tediousness and i save my brian for other tasks. alot of times i'm just researching my next thing while it chugs away. i come back, lint and review and i'm good to go.

i'm honestly still writing the majority of the code myself, esp if it's like design stuff or new features where the requirements and direction aren't as clear, but when i need to it gives me a huge boost.

keeps me in the flow, i basically recharge while continuing to code. and it's not a small script but a full fledged app, albeit very straightforward architecture wise. the gains are very real. i'm just surprised at the sentiment on HN around it. it's not even just skepticism but outright dogging on it.

I interpreted that as you rushing to code something you should have approached with a book or a guide first.

A full two thirds of the comment you replied to there were me saying "when these things start to make dumb mistakes here are the steps I take to fix the problem".

this is the rhetoric that you will see replied to effectively any negative experience with LLMs in programming.

I’m not a manager by the way, my previous comment was more of a devil’s advocate/hypothetical question.

I leveled up because I practice mentoring others. But it still doesn’t make sense for the organization to hire juniors. Yes I realize someone has to. It’s especially true for managers who have an open req to fill because they need work done now.

On the other hand, my one, only and hopefully last role in BigTech where I worked previously, they could afford to have an intern program and when they came back after college have a 6 month early career/career transition program to get them up to speed. They could afford the dead weight loss.

  > a devil’s advocate/hypothetical question.

I often think about the savage job-destroying nature of the open source community: hundreds of thousands of developers working tirelessly to unemploy as many of their peers as possible by giving away the code they've written for free.

(Interesting how people talk about AI destroying programming jobs all the time, but rarely mention the impact of billions of dollars of code being given away.)

> Those of us who write software professionally are literally in a field premised on automating other people's jobs away.

How true that is depends on what sort of software you write. Very little of what I've accomplished in my career can be fairly described as "automating other people's jobs away".

"Ten year contract you say?"

"Yes, yes... Satellites stay in orbit for a while. What about it?"

"Looks a bit cramped in there."

"Stop complaining, at least it's a real job, now get in, we're about to launch."

Speak for yourself.

I've worked in a medical space writing software so that people can automate away the job that their bodies used to do before they broke.

> Those of us who write software professionally are literally in a field premised on automating other people's jobs away.

Depends what you write. What I work on isn't about eliminating jobs at all, if anything it creates them. And like, actual, good jobs that people would want, not, again, paying someone below the poverty line $5 to deliver an overpriced burrito across town.

Bit of a tangent but...

Haven't we been automating jobs away since the industrial revolution? I know AI may be an exception to this trend, but at least with classical programming, demand goes up, GDP per capita goes up, and new industries are born.

I mean, there's three ways to get stuff done: do it yourself, get someone else to do it, or get a machine to do it.

#2 doesn't scale, since someone still has to do it. If we want every person to not be required to do it (washing, growing food, etc), #3 is the only way forward. Automation and specialization have made the unthinkable possible for an average person. We've a long way to go, but I don't see automation as a fundamentally bad thing, as long as there's a simultaneous effort to help (especially those who are poor) transition to a new form of working.

Yeah I see it as fair game

It’s not automation that is the problem, it’s that the fruits of that automation disproportionately go to those at the top. Don’t blame software engineering for that, blame capitalism.

> So it's unfair to say they don't exist. Rather, it seems they're structured in an unhelpful way for those who are working double jobs, etc.

I'll be sure to alert the next person I encounter working UberEats for slave wages that the resources exist that they cannot use. I'm sure this difference will impact their lives greatly.

Edit: My point isn't that UberEats drivers make slave wages (though they do): My point is that from the POV of said people and others who need the aforementioned resources, whether they don't exist or exist and are unusable is fucking irrelevant.

That's fine; read it as me speaking to the whole thread, not challenging you directly. Technology drives economic productivity; increasing economic productivity generally implies worker displacement. That workers come out ahead in the long run (they have in the past; it's obviously not a guarantee) is besides my point. Software is automating software development away, the same way it automated a huge percentage of (say) law firm billable hours away. We'd better be ready to suck it up!

  >  You don’t invest in your future ... the average tenure of a software developer is 3 years and at any time an employee can leave.

Well this is a 2 stage problem and I think the response is bad for multiple reasons.

1) Tragedy of the Commons: If we all act like this, then no one gets invested in. If we all invest in our employees then when they leave another company gets the rewards. That's still true when "we" are the "other company". You still benefit regardless. Under the condition that most companies (or rather at least the big companies) collude in this way. They have good reason to as coalitions maximize utility for all parties involved.

2) Why the fuck are we training people and then tossing them away? We do this in many ways but the most obvious one is hiring a new dev and paying them more than the current devs. Guess what? That new dev needs to be trained and now your old devs are pissed that they aren't getting paid as much. So now you not only waste time and money onboarding someone new, you lose your experience.

  > Companies don’t care about society - they care about their bottom line

I'm telling you that this is dumb shortsighted thinking. This is a low order approximation. It is true under "spherical chicken in a vacuum" type of settings, but not in the real world. These are not mutually exclusive things. Remember how Ford paid his employees more and gave them time off? We're told that story as he needed customers. But there's a side benefit to that too. Not only are the workers happier and more productive (leading to fewer mistakes and costly accidents) but they're walking advertisements. There goes that Ford employee in his car, I wish I could be like them. Yes, it requires understanding abstraction and making future predictions to understand this rather straightforward logic, but we're programmers who spend all our days dealing with abstractions and trying to predict future events (i.e. how the damn thing will be used and especially used incorrectly).

  > My job is to do what’s best for the company as long as it is not illegal or unethical

Exactly!

I don't understand why you think we're in disagreement about this. Every single one of my points has come down to this. I've said it explicitly. My very first message stated that there were selfish reasons to do these things. The selfishness and foresight doesn't apply just to yourself.

  >  My job is not to make society better

Not always, but these are usually strongly correlated. There's 3 ways about it, right? If your job makes society better, awesome. If it is neutral, so be it. If it makes society worse, well you deserve hate because you're harming people. But the point of an economy is to align value with improving society, right? We don't have to get super philosophical here. There's many ways to improve society. Entertainment, a new widget, social action, cleaning shit, whatever. I'm not gonna judge here and pretend what's better and not.

But it is just a weird argument all together anyways. Your job isn't to make society better? Read that again. Your job isn't to make your life better? Certainly a paycheck makes your life better, right? I really hope it isn't making it worse. But we're social creatures too. Your job isn't to make your family's lives better? Your job isn't to make your friends' lives better? If it isn't to better yourself, your family, and your friends, then what the fuck are we even doing here? You have autonomy. And here's the fun part, if we care about our local groups and improve our local groups, this usually improves broader groups by extension. We're interconnected. I'm not saying you need to care about some dude on the opposite side of the country, but I sure as hope you don't think your job is to do harm. The "not illegal or unethical" part really is concerning. Frankly, I'd call doing harm unethical, even if it is small. It's more unethical to steal someone's wallet than to snatch a penny, but both are still unethical.

So I really don't get where you're trying to go with this. Because frankly, the selfish act improves society. It's just you have to consider that other people exist. If you're selfish and you model a world where you're alone, then yeah, maximize yourself at all costs. But when there are other agents in the world, the way to maximize your utility is through coalitions, through improving the group.

  > However, in that world, a company that chooses not to contribute

  > How do we adjust the incentives so that bad actors are not motivated to cheat the system?

  > this is similar to playing Iterated Prisoners' Dilemma

  > How are you going to convince HR or the PHB that their policies are insane?

The only reason we had it before was because back in the 90s when I graduated, even outside of the dot com boom, regular old enterprise companies were looking for developers and there was a shortage. They didn’t have a choice but to hire juniors.

But as far as you get what you pay for, it’s not hard to find “good enough” framework enterprise developers and have a few good experience “seniors”. Especially with remote work, you dangle that in front of people my age, we are willing to take a haircut. For me now, remote work, autonomy, and a smaller company is worth being able to say “no” to more money when managers at Google (GCP) reach out to me.

By senior, I don’t mean “I codez real gud”, I mean the tech industries definition - someone who can deal with “scope” and “ambiguity” and has a history of highly impactful projects.

Just to be clear, I spent most of my career as an “enterprise dev” until 2020 at 46 when a position at AWS fell into my lap (Professional Services department). I’m no longer there. But it did cause me to pivot to cloud consulting specializing in app dev and now I am a “staff architect” at a third party company.

Got it, you're talking about workers getting ahead as a category -- no objections to that.

I doubt the displaced computers managed to find a better job on average. Probably even their kids were disadvantaged since the parents had fewer options to support their education.

So, who knows if this specific group of people and their descendants ever fully recovered let alone got ahead.

> I think it’s fair to say a lot of gig workers, especially those with families, are having a very difficult time economically.

Great point. I wonder if this has to do with the current housing crisis and cost of utilities... Food has never been more affordable, in fact free with food banks and soup kitchens. But (IMHO) onerous zoning has really slowed down development and driven up prices.

Another cost is it's pretty much impossible to do anything without a smartphone and internet. I suppose libraries have free internet, but being able to get to said library is another issue.

And like you said, contract work trades flexibility for benefits, and that gets exploited by these companies.

I guess it just sucks sometimes because these issues are super hairy (shut down Uber, great, now you've just put everyone out of a job). "For every complex problem there is a solution which is clear, simple, and wrong."

I think this is all a great argument for a strong social safety net. It’s not a great argument for keeping people in pointless jobs doing work that has been made obsolete by automation.

> I'm trying to argue that in aggregate, life is getting better for people, while also awknowledging that there's not an equal distribution.

I bet you like Steven Pinker. He does this shit too where he goes "people 50 years ago didn't even have air conditioning, and now a poor person has one in their car and one in their home" which ignores several things that are going to be their own rabbit holes so I'm just going to not, but that doesn't mean things are better. Yeah, poor people have more stuff, more creature comforts, more "luxuries" today than kings had in the 1400's. That doesn't change the fact that they're barely getting by, living perpetually on a debt and stress treadmill that studies too numerous to count have shown decrease their quality of life, shorten their overall lifespan and lead to health problems, in a country where having health problems is also, totally but coincidence I'm sure, the fastest ticket one can have to poverty.

And the worst part is, it doesn't NEED to be that way. We have more of... basically everything than we ever have, yet it all costs more, and tons of businesses go under, and everybody gets poorer, while the richest grow ever, ever, ever richer.

2 trillion was transferred from the working class to the 1% during COVID. 2. Fucking. Trillion. Dollars.

> Hmm? Like when I said "Another cost is it's pretty much impossible to do anything without a smartphone and internet"?

"Pretty much impossible" and "impossible" are not the same. It is not possible to do gig work without a smartphone.

> Source? That doesn't line up with what I found.

It's going to vary widely based on locale. Mine when I commented was the suburbs of Chicago.

> This is just FUD if you haven't cited your sources on average/median/distribution of pay in whatever area.

Yeah, it is. Because gig work is inconsistent. Would you be okay working your job when your salary was completely dependent on your performance, sure, but also just how much work you had to do during that particular day, and if there was a decent chance that one day you show up to your office, sit on your ass for 8 hours, and go home without a penny?

I doubt it.

> Thus increasing prices of rides

This just in: products and services should cost what it costs for them to be created/rendered unto you, with a little more at the end so the person doing it earns a living. If you can't afford to have a person pick up a burrito for you, drive it across town in a car, and drop it on your doorstep, I would humbly suggest you get in your own car, and get your own burrito.

> Uber just started being profitable after dumping billions of dollars in subsidies

Then shut the doors! If what you're doing doesn't work, close up shop! Why does Uber have to exist? Are people better off being Uber drivers than being homeless? I mean, I guess? I wouldn't call that an open and shut case. If all the people doing gig work were instead completely unemployed, and out protesting in the streets of their capital cities, maybe society would actually do something about the rampant exploitation? Maybe all these companies couldn't get away with paying people utterly shit wages if we didn't mandate that those on assistance programs find jobs, any jobs, even if those jobs don't get them off the assistance?

I would turn this back to you: instead of asking me why people are entitled to food, why are these massive companies entitled to exist? Why are we funneling people with few options towards them to work as many hours as they can while remaining firmly below the poverty line? Why do we demand people who are starving take a certain number of interviews every week so we give them access to a menial amount of sustenance, while judging them for taking it?

> Uber won because they offered a superior service to taxis. I'm not going to open the can of worms of their predatory behavior,

Yeah I bet you're not, because you don't want to think about HOW that victory was achieved, be it the financial cost, or the human cost. Now you have a shiny app and can get rides around your city. Nobody gives a shit about the fate of labor as long as they get instant gratifications, same as it ever was.