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- Hacker News
- > Software development was one of the last ‘guild fields’ and now we are seeing its industrialisation occur.
Doesn’t really support the rest of the argument. If you’re a skeptic and think it’s all hype, there’s nothing to worry about.
by andy99 - that'd only be true if you have a lot of trust that people care about quality. It's wrong to think of industrialization as only affecting producers. Fast fashion is a good example of this. There's studies on the quality of for example jeans and they've declined over decades. Mid 20th century cotton denim was a lot better than what you can buy now. Animation is another one as many people have noticed, you have movies that have somehow managed to decline in quality but nobody cares because you can churn out ten times as many. The nutritional quality of food has declined for 60 years as ultra-processed and industrially produced foods have taken over.
The worst scenario isn't actually that machines are intelligent and you lose your job, it's that they're stupid and you lose your job because in our quantitative glutton culture qualitative judgement is entirely gone to begin with
by Barrin92 - - you forgot the biggest and most important point of all!
- Everyone and their mother using an LLM is slowly and steadily destroying their brain cells and abilities in the process while creating a learned dependence
- Give it about 5 yrs, mark my words. The studies ll come out saying "95% programmers cannot write a hello world without an LLM now"
- Now someone smart ll hop in on my comment and bring calculators into the argument and I have answer waiting for them that those do (not able to put a direct link here for some reason)
by vivzkestrel - idk. I get more stuff done, faster, that I wouldn’t have been able to. You have to use it judiciously and with supervision - I can see how letting it get out of control would negate the benefits. But with good use, its undeniable.
- It takes some time to learn how to get these systems to work well, and learn what they’re good for. I think people who don’t see the benefits either haven’t dug in enough or haven’t used them for things they’re good at.
Do coding agents help me with highly technical work where it’s some deep thought and discussion with coworkers and eventually I change five lines of code? Not really.
But I can debug a weird kernel panic or optimizer bug from a standing start in an hour when it would have taken me all day without these tools.
by wat10000 - your perception is that you get more stuff done faster, and that seems to be the conclusion that most using LLM's come to (including myself): but there are no productivity gains that are externally observable to show for it (yet).
That might be because of some lag, but another explanation might be that the tools are really effective at increasing someone's perception of their productivity while net productivity gains measured over long time windows are low or zero. Another explanation might be that the incompetent/negligent users are causing enough harm to nearly neutralize the gains brought by proficient / effective users. I don't know what the explanation is, but there is a mystery in the divergence between users' perceptions of their own productivity, and the observed productivity gains in the economy.
by mistercheph - the decision i have to make dozens if not hundreds times a day: do i actually look at this crap or trust it blindly and let it slide? I'm honestly reading maybe 20% tops of what "I" produce (and what other people post for my review) I think you do lose skills and understanding that way. Sure, you can always ask the robot to do the tldr for you, but.... yeah, something is still lost, not in a good way.by twelve40
- That’s been my experience, too.
I’m in the final prep for ship phase of a project that started February. It’s a bottom-to-top rewrite of a project that’s been shipping for two years, and took two years to write, initially.
I’m deliberately doing it all with the $20/month ChatGPT sub. After it ships, I’ll move to the $100/month sub; but I want to be able to say that the entire project was done on a low-tier LLM subscription.
- > The not-so-quiet goal of the LLM push by big tech was to homogenise intellectual labour such that it can be made fungible. When labour is fungible you can swap it out whenever you like for an alternative, decreasing the bargaining power of workers. Software development was one of the last ‘guild fields’ and now we are seeing its industrialisation occur.
This is really well said. I had not put my finger on it before. Maybe this is a next move in the saga to avoid labor unions in engineering.
by mrdomino- - >The not-so-quiet goal of the LLM push by big tech was to homogenise intellectual labour such that it can be made fungible. When labour is fungible you can swap it out whenever you like for an alternative, decreasing the bargaining power of workers.
Especially if you replace people with robots that don't need days off and have the people train their replacements.
by thataccount - All AI hallucinates, and therefore is unpredictable and unreliable. 1.5 trillion dollars to prove the obvious. It has no place in production use. IMHO at least. They want so badly to get rid of all of us, and replace us with something that doesn't complain, doesn't have kids, or outside lives or want ick, vacations. Most of you are paycheck to paycheck, statistically speaking, so you have a vested interest in how this all turns out.
edit: I get it, it's not a popular opinion.
But am I wrong?
If the problem of hallucination in AI has been solved, maybe I missed it?
by spl757 - The "problem" of hallucination has not been solved, and never will be fully solved, because that's just how LLMs work. They're "hallucinating" 100% of the time but we only call it a hallucination when they're wrong.
But they're right much more often than they used to be. If you haven't tried a near-Frontier model lately (say, Claude Opus or ChatGPT Sol) you probably need to update your priors for just how often they can be right.
by reverius42 - To the author’s point about there not being enough evidence to support pro-AI claims — Additionally, there are studies and articles coming out showing those people are wrong and AI only makes people barely more efficient. Not the 10x tech CEOs are claiming while slashing thousands of jobs
https://getdx.com/blog/ai-productivity-gains-are-10-percent-...
- (March 2026)by E-Reverance
- The problem is that LLMs improve so fast, your article may very well be out of date by now.by matteoraso
- I'm definitely able to spew out more code than I used to. Good code. Maybe not great code, but good code.
But I spent a lot of time in the second half of this week dealing with friction with a team that is very annoyed that I'm moving fast and using an agile methodology so I can't tell them the exact, precise REST calls that I'm going to have for them in six months designed to a tee and signed off in triplicate before they start development against it. Manifesting that increase in code production as real value to the business is going to take more from me than just spewing the code out more quickly.
AI isn't creating this problem. I would have had this problem anyhow even if I were writing all the code by hand again. I know, because I've been there before. But the increased velocity is manifesting in increased organizational stress and not just increased velocity.
AI is perhaps even helping solve it to some degree, though far from totally. I have written before about how people eventually learned not to play the "oh well we can't do this until we have documentation" card on me [1]. This week they played the "well, I see you have docs but they aren't in our precise format". Guess what AI can do in about 15 minutes really well? You may recall the term "style transfer" getting tossed about a lot 3-4 years ago, and it is still something AI is extremely good at, and "take these docs in this format and convert them to that format" is just a style-transfer problem. AI really does chew at the "oh but we need docs" old-school card... and they can't even complain about the quality of the AI docs because in order to do that, they'd have to actually read them, and that is not the point of the "but we need docs" card, you see....
by jerf - The last bullet point is the most important. The industry is most hyped about AI so that they can pay software developers $70k instead of paying them $200k.
I don’t really agree that AI can’t make development faster, though. What the author describes as the negative AI outcome is blind vibecoding. There are many other ways to use it, and even the basic “enhanced autocomplete” is a net benefit, especially since that functionality is dirt cheap or free.
by Grombobulous - Not really. The other bullet points are the reality. The last one is the MBA wet dream.
We have been programmed to believe that MBA wet dreams are inevitable because "$x hundreds of billions invested can't be wrong" but they very often are.
by pydry - >> We are 4 years into this ‘revolution’ and the industry has almost nothing to show for it.
If you actually used LLMs instead of preaching against them from the sidelines with no real experience, you'd know such statements are wrong.
This is the real problem with many of the anti LLM folks - they tell us about LLMs and also tell us they don't use them.
"That thing cannot do the stuff you say it can. And there is no way I will ever try it. But I know for sure I am right."
by wewewedxfgdf - I see this pattern in a lot of things.
- people who preach against PV solar... while people I actually know broke even 10 or more years ago and have been happily getting "free power" for a lot of their needs
- people who preach against electric cars... while people I actually know are driving them with no "range anxiety" or "replaced main batteries", but their non-engineer spouse/kids are driving the cars fine too.
- people who preach that tesla self driving isn't viable/etc... while lots of people are using tesla to drive themselves around for > 90% of their driving
by m463 - And when you show them evidence of the incredible things that can be done they stick their fingers in their ears and say "I'm not listening. I'm not listening. looping ad infinitum. OR they start saying "Oh yeah, prove it with hard numbers." when nothing about software productivity has ever been able to be proven with hard numbers. It becomes a semantic word game that you cannot win because nothing you say will get them to believe because they don't want to believe. The LLM haters are the most dogmatic of unbelievers.
Which I find weird - the greatest fun for me is making a computer do something awesome. I learned to program because I want that outcome.
I respect if you love the art and craft of hand programming but it's something else entirely to simply deny that LLM's are what they are - which is to say so amazing it is really beyond belief and they are getting more so every year.
If you're a hand programmer forever then fine, just don't make a fool of yourself by saying that everyone is lying about LLMs, to justify your choices.
by wewewedxfgdf - > If you actually used LLMs instead of preaching against them from the sidelines with no real experience, you'd know such statements are wrong.
I have. Which is how I know that such statements are correct.
by bigstrat2003 - > If you actually used LLMs instead of preaching against them from the sidelines with no real experience, you'd know such statements are wrong.
Unlike the author, I'm an LLM optimist; but this take doesn't make sense to me. The thing you show cannot be "hey look at this LLM-based workflow, that's so much better than last year".
Where is the big browser, operating system, or other piece of work that has been able to quickly compete with the existing entries in the market due to LLMs?
The only one that I can think of off the top of my head is the rewrite of Bun in Rust. I think the fact that Claude Code runs on millions of devices on top of that rewrite is the sort of impressive demonstration that would prove that LLMs have lasting, systemic effects -- but it is telling that the only one I can think of was made by the extremely well funded lab that also happens to build the LLM.
- > This is the real problem with many of the anti LLM folks
(BTW, I am the OP: I posted this, but I didn't write the article.)
No, the real problem here is that you do not understand the anti-LLM arguments.
I won't touch LLMs for anything except translation. But my anti-LLM stance is nothing whatsoever to do with whether they work or not (and that is even without the extreme torturing of the word "work" that the advocates do.)
My objection is based on the terrible crimes committed in building them (from theft), training them (at catastrophic ecological cost), in running them (ditto), in the effects on their individual users (cumulative brain damage), on their corporate users (economic destruction), and so on.
If they work is incidental. The believers like what LLMs do. For me, by my definitions, LLMs do not work. They extrude content that I never ever want to see, or read, or here, or want to execute. But for the botlickers, that is enough: they extrude a product. The botlickers want product.
I don't care. I don't want the product, but more to the point, I want the machines making the product not to exist... and if the price of that is all the people using the machines to never work again, and all the companies using them to go bankrupt, I would be absolutely delighted.
by lproven - > If you actually used LLMs instead of preaching against them from the sidelines with no real experience, you'd know such statements are wrong.
What about the people who do have a lot of LLM experience and agree with OP?
> That thing cannot do the stuff you say it can. And there is no way I will ever try it. But I know for sure I am right.
If someone claims to be able to fly by strapping bird wing shaped pieces of plywood with feathers glued on to their arms, do you need to personally jump off a tower with them to say they don't work, or can you look at the results of others attempting it and draw conclusions based on that? LLM proponents are making claims about their capabilities which can relatively easily be checked without using LLMs yourself. To pick an example where LLM proponents are correct, anyone who says LLMs can't generate syntactically valid code can be proven wrong fairly easily by producing an example of syntactically valid, LLM generated code.
Further, if you read the rest of the paragraph you responded to, it's clear that this claim is about the state of the industry as a whole. "Software has not improved in quality, got faster, become cheaper to produce (when you exclude the mountain of poor-quality demoware that no reputable organisation would touch with a barge pole), or become more capable." Whether this is true or not is something that can be evaluated without ever having prompted yourself, or even arguably without being a developer at all.
- >The not-so-quiet goal of the LLM push by big tech was to homogenise intellectual labour such that it can be made fungible. When labour is fungible you can swap it out whenever you like for an alternative, decreasing the bargaining power of workers. Software development was one of the last ‘guild fields’ and now we are seeing its industrialisation occur.
I think that the industrialization of software development already happened decades ago. The common professional software development methodologies, both waterfall and sprint-based, ARE the industrialization of software development. Isn't modern "agile", sprint-based software development methodology directly influenced by Japanese manufacturing methods? I don't know when software development actually was a guild field, and my personal experience doesn't reach back this far, but based on what I've read at least, it seems to me that even back in the 1990s it was already not a guild field.
by hax0ron3 - I personally look at react-foo and see something thats the opposite of how I want to work as a software craftsman [ small code, lispy / function flavored style, opinionated, few dependencies ]
For similar aesthetic reasons, have only dabbled with code-gen LLMs. Im happy to vibe code css and html but not, well actual code. I'm aware of my own double standard, Im fine with median-reverting banal css and html.
I do worry about some aspects of LLMs :
- google giving AI code snippets so easily, prevents traffic to sites like stack-overflow, where discussion happens
- vibe coding means less people hit the actual hard parts of coding, which result in learning to think as a developer. Thence where the next generation of developers who understand code ?
- code will become a magical, inscrutable black box where no-one understands how it works. DNNs and LLMs have this feature already. At least with LLM discovered math, the proof in lean exists, which is independent at how it was arrived at / searched for.
- if I write a novel, and the DNN AI detects it as AI slop with 68% probability, then what recourse do I have to prove its human written ?
- circular training : subsequent rounds of LLMs trained not on human input, but on LLM slop of the previous generation [ the %ge of which increases ]
- you will own nothing : fortunately it looks like self-hosted open weight LLMS will remain a thing, but the massive spend by hyperscaler companies on Datacenters/GPUs/RAM has driven down supply and driven up prices of CPU, GPU, RAM for enthusiasts / gamers / home AI nerds / garage startups .. which might stifle innovation.
by jgord - A "guild field" is not a well-defined matter, but I think it's still the easiest engineering field to sit at home on your personal gear and learn skills that can get you hired in a real job with a future without attending any professional school for the field.
In fact the four-year degree you'll get from school is getting increasingly distant from the skills I actually want out of a new grad. It's not impossible to bridge the gap or anything but my transition into the commercial realm in the early 2000s was a cakewalk compared to the sheer number of things I'm asking a new grad to learn as soon as they're settled in at their desk... source control, CI/CD, bug trackers, devops, and that's just the beginning of that list not the end.
by jerf - >productivity
I recently experienced some cognitive decline due to chronic health issues. This is unfortunate timing because I am shipping a game with online multiplayer for the first time. So "brain works properly" is kind of a basic job requirement! But you work with what you got...
Some day I have the energy to do programming "manually", but on many days, the difference between "tasks get done" and "I am just staring at the screen reading the same code over and over again" is "ask the LLM to do it."
So I have had to shift my identity from "the guy who does the thing" to "the guy who ensures the thing has been done."
That being said, I do check the diffs carefully. (I tried a more hands-off approach a few months ago, and that was a pretty bad idea.) And I've learned to make the diffs as small as possible: more digestible for me, and less room for the AI to go off the rails.
Nice bonus to small, well defined changes is that small, fast, cheap models can handle them. (Having a great time with Luna lately, even on Low reasoning effort, which I wasn't expecting at all.)
by andai - My story is a bit similar. Recently, I broke my wrist due to a fall and have also been suffering from eye strain. I couldn’t spend much time “working” on screen as much as I need. And so I ask LLMs to do a major chunk of work, review and test the changes, course correct things to align with architecture that I’ve outlined and get things done as if I were working normally.by microflash