What's a Dirty Secret No One Wants to Admit in the Tech Industry?

Join the discussion

• Hacker News
• 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.

  by colesantiago
• This is a huge cope
  by yuye
• People who work in tech aren't as interested in the tech as they are in the money.
  by msarrel
• 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.
  by yuye
• 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.
  by dlcarrier
• 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.
  by NishanStepak
• It's all bash scripts
  by bezko
• 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)

  by toomuchtodo
• 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

  by fsflover
• Computer security is a solved problem, and has been since the 1980s.

  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.

  [1] https://wiki.c2.com/?PowerBox

  by mikewarot
• AI is not making engineers more productive. It makes them lazy and think less critically. Also leads to soft-mindedness.
  by oldsklgdfth
• 120 hours of leetcode prep to get a job centering divs with claude
  by ashleyn
• 120 hours of leetcode prep to get a job writing design documents
  by yuye
• 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.

  by bob1029
• 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.

  by oldsklgdfth
• 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.

  by cratermoon