That AI and search engines use a lot of cheap labor. On systems like Mechanical Turk, or hiring third world quality raters to check results. It is particularly obvious.
Virtually no one in tech seems interested in doing what Jobs suggested despite the level of success he delivered.
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.
A compounding factor is when requirements are filtered through B2B layers. At which point the end-user is not the customer and it turns into a game of telephone.
Apple sidesteps this issue with vertical integration.
Automation isn't having robots assemble things, it's laying off accountants who read numbers from spreadsheets, type them into their calculator, and enter the number back into the spreadsheet, and replacing them with a spreadsheet that was created by someone who actually knows what they're doing.
The average programmer is an illusion. Most programmers working in software, and I’m including not just the tech industry specifically, but all companies that employ or contact for programming are not very good. The relatively few who are outstanding skew the average. You know the joke about Bill Gates walks into a bar?
Most programmers were already doing what vibe programmers do with AI now, just more manually.
The only shaming I’ve seen are for people using AI badly or not at all.
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.
Most of the work is meaningless and some form of theater, lots of folks are chasing total comp and resume driven development. Many metrics measured are orthogonal to success, and the work that matters to success is hard to measure at all. Complexity for complexity's sake. "Just one more framework|technology|abstraction bro."
That AI and search engines use a lot of cheap labor. On systems like Mechanical Turk, or hiring third world quality raters to check results. It is particularly obvious.
AI is not making engineers more productive. It makes them lazy and think less critically. Also leads to soft-mindedness.
Virtually no one in tech seems interested in doing what Jobs suggested despite the level of success he delivered.
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.
A compounding factor is when requirements are filtered through B2B layers. At which point the end-user is not the customer and it turns into a game of telephone.
Apple sidesteps this issue with vertical integration.
120 hours of leetcode prep to get a job centering divs with claude
Automation isn't having robots assemble things, it's laying off accountants who read numbers from spreadsheets, type them into their calculator, and enter the number back into the spreadsheet, and replacing them with a spreadsheet that was created by someone who actually knows what they're doing.
It's all bash scripts
Most production code nobody actually understands in full. People just know their part, and the rest runs on inertia and fear of touching it.
People who work in tech aren't as interested in the tech as they are in the money.
And those that did go into tech out of genuine interest would eventually love nothing more than to leave tech, but stay for the money.
The average programmer is an illusion. Most programmers working in software, and I’m including not just the tech industry specifically, but all companies that employ or contact for programming are not very good. The relatively few who are outstanding skew the average. You know the joke about Bill Gates walks into a bar?
Most programmers were already doing what vibe programmers do with AI now, just more manually.
1. True security cannot rely on code correctness but only on reliable compartmentalization. Qubes OS does this right.
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
The business customers don't understand the concept of a dangling else.
That most people could care less about tech and are just in it for the grift.
The same programmers that shame others for using AI tools like Codex, Claude are also secretly using it themselves.
Whether at work or personal projects or anything else.
Nobody wants to admit it, but they are using AI.
This is a huge cope
It is real.
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.
The only shaming I’ve seen are for people using AI badly or not at all.
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.
Most of the work is meaningless and some form of theater, lots of folks are chasing total comp and resume driven development. Many metrics measured are orthogonal to success, and the work that matters to success is hard to measure at all. Complexity for complexity's sake. "Just one more framework|technology|abstraction bro."
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)