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- Hacker News
- My work slack used to have lots of questions. Now very less. That should be celebrated because we don’t have to depend on anyone. But I guess you can paint anything in a bad way.by simianwords
- The current "slow down" is a back-handed attempt to let the world catch up with the amount of slop that has been generated. The speed and time-to-market bill is piling up and in the next 5 years there will no humans that can understand this mess. So agentic SWE systems, need to change. Either we trust the validation layer at the end, or we take back control and also learn along the way.by integrallis
- Oh god that article about Astra is so relatable. I was wondering why it was refusing to write any whitespace and was just spitting out the worst code imaginable, now I know it's not just my harness or prompts. It's truly a horrible coding model.by slopinthebag
- > And that’s true: nobody wants to see how John prompts. There is something repulsive and fundamentally unsexy about talking to an agent. It feels fine when you are doing it, but others... ugh, get a chatroom. Their prompts are cringe; their agents are weird. Like looking at someone else’s TikTok feed.
So real. There’s still something fundamentally embarrassing about saying you used AI to do something. This leads to a pet theory of mine that most people use AI far more than they say they do.
by demibabs - I agree with everything in this article (though I am still optimistic that LLMs will help otherwise unskilled people write personal software), but unless labor starts meaningfully organizing and pushing back against the corporate power that causes these outcomes, things will only get worse
Like we can say "this sucks" twenty thousand times, but what's the plan? Maybe some of the senior people who can be productive because of our knowledge who may cease to exist as a class resulting in a century of slop should get together and talk praxis. Otherwise all these articles are just training data
by advael - Its inspiring to see folks putting effort into verbalizing the conflicts and unexpected side effects of working with LLMs. Our feelings really do matter at the end of the day.
But I dont know if they matter to the employers who can only see LLMs as "free milk", and developers as the "milking machine".
by BatchJob - My work Slack channels are ghost-towns. People are logged in, but they're never saying anything. I often find myself wondering if anyone is even working. PRs have their names on them, even the review comments are posted from _their_ accounts, but it is obvious that Claude wrote everything from the code, the unnecessarily verbose change summary, to their comments. Even their replies to my change requests start with "You're right — …".
I miss the days when the engineering Slack channels had long threads of new and interesting ways to do things, discussions of something we could do next to make work easier or fix long-standing issues. We used to build up our own knowledge of who was good at specific things, what they'd be interested in working on. Now everyone just has their slop-machine spit out every piece of a change for the entire stack without paying any attention to the details.
- The team thing is killing us right now. Everyone is just kind of silo'd with their agents and they present these entire complex units of work with no input from the rest of the team, and by then it's too late to fix.by empath75