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  • Hacker News
  • If I were working in marketing and I wanted to increase utilization of the nuclear power plant next door, I would wipe 50 years of computer science and introduce "agent programming" and pretend it's the future. What are the odds people would buy it? Hit send.
    by wseqyrku
  • There's a lot that could be said against agentic programming, but I don't understand how it wipes away anyway about CS - everything about this is a massive tower built on top of (and effectively utilizing) everything that we've learned about CS fundamentals and engineering over these decades.
    by falcor84
  • Well put, and I think the problem extends beyond agentic systems to regular software. Someone in an organisation whips up a useful product, publishes it and is now on the hook for bug fixes, feature requests and operations. The maintenance cost is often much larger than the cost of building it now that producing an MVP is so easy.
    by killiancarroll
  • It actually extends to all automation, even before computers. Replacing oxen with tractors? Now you have to keep the tractors running.
    by munchler
  • > But a demo is not a system. A demo is controlled. The input is clean, the edge cases are removed, and the happy path is selected in advance. Real work has missing data, unclear requests, old records, broken integrations, private context, bad formatting, vague instructions, and exceptions nobody wrote down.

    This has been the case for decades. LLMs are just magnifying it.

    That's why I feel that an important part of any engineer's development, should be working on shipping product; where they can have firsthand experience with its use "in the wild."

    It can be sobering; sometimes, downright depressing.

    But it's a great lesson.

    by ChrisMarshallNY
  • Nothing teaches you like maintaining something for a decade
    by pjm331
  • Typically when I ship anything that is going to be customer facing I am a nervous wreck. Although I'm only 4 years into my career. Does it get better with time?
    by hasteg
  • This is definitely the case with ERP/accounting systems. AI can make the demo look better, but someone inside the company still has to own each process.

    I’ve found that no matter what systems companies implement, behind the scenes they usually still run on spreadsheets. Moving people away from that is where the pushback starts.

    by ngsevers
  • More AI written slop...

    Just skip it.

    Not worth reading.

    by Alien1Being
  • Came here to figure out why this Ad has 30 upvotes…
    by aetherspawn
  • Flag it
    by jagged-chisel
  • Writing about the operating cost of AI tools while the whole article is a complete AI slop. :)
    by shibaprasadb
  • Whether written with AI or not, I don't necessarily agree with the sentiment that it's AI slop. We too often only categorize between no AI used and AI slop.

    Does them using AI to write the article invalidate the points stated in any way? I personally don't think so. I too am weary of constant bombardment with AI but at the same time being against something just because AI was in the loop isn't much better, if at all.

    by 8-prime
  • Yes, but I hear devs cannot live without Claude!

    The irony.

    by pjmlp
  • The promise is AI slop, the reality is HN front page!
    by N_Lens
  • Genuinely curious: How do you know?
    by baxtr