Ask HN: What's a Dirty Secret No One Wants to Admit in the Tech Industry? What’s a Dirty Secret No One Wants To Admit In The Tech/Software Industry? Industry as a whole or within software engineering. |
Ask HN: What's a Dirty Secret No One Wants to Admit in the Tech Industry? What’s a Dirty Secret No One Wants To Admit In The Tech/Software Industry? Industry as a whole or within software engineering. |
Most programmers were already doing what vibe programmers do with AI now, just more manually.
Telling an average developer to work backward from the customer will generally be met with a foul mood. Especially when that constraint suggests that the currently preferred technical ideology or tribe is no longer suitable.
The whole thing is one big ego trip most of the time.
Apple sidesteps this issue with vertical integration.
Unfortunately adopting it requires us to abandon the ambient authority model of application development and our operating systems that support it. Currently when you tell an application to open a file, it can actually do almost anything. There are operating systems that enforce your choices, not many, they're very niche, for now.
We're at the point where the power grid would be if nobody ever used fuses or circuit breakers. All power could rush to any fault. The same is true with any application a user might run under Linux, Windows, etc.
To save a lot of grief: I'm not suggesting we use Windows UAC, AppArmor, or any other administratively driven security measures. Think power boxes[1] that replace file dialog boxes, and the give file capabilities to the application per the users will, in a secure, transparent and easy to understand manner.
2. Your phone is an entire computer, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47367568
3. Intel ME / AMD PSP is a computer inside your computer that obeys someone else, not you.
4. Ads are an attack, aimed at your brain. They try to inject malware into your thinking, manipulating your worldview and your actions, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49282599, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43595269
Choose Boring Technology (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289512 - August 2026 (245 comments)
In Defense of Simple Architectures (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39440179 - February 2024 (436 comments)
what does solved even mean? If I don't own the wheel, I'm not reinventing it. Paying rent for Microsoft's or Google's wheels don't solve my software needs.
Whether at work or personal projects or anything else.
Nobody wants to admit it, but they are using AI.
In the end you and I and everyone else will be using AI for work and personal use.
No amount of shaming others using AI would stop it.
The bigger cope will be engineers losing their jobs by not adapting to the change that is happening in front of them.
I also think we should differentiate between programming to get a program you can do something else with, programming to understand the machine, and programming to give the programmer a logical challenge to keep their skills sharp.
These technologies aren’t just going to go away just because you choose not to use them, or if you change careers, retire or whatever.