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> If it's so much more productive, where is all the great software that's being built with it?

This is such a new and emerging area that I don't understand how this is a constructive comment on any level.

You can be skeptical of the technology in good faith, but I think one shouldn't be against people being curious and engaging in experimentation. A lot of us are actively trying to see what exactly we can build with this, and I'm not an AI influencer by any means. How do we find out without trying?

I still feel like we're still at a "building tools to build tools" stage in multi-agent coding. A lot of interesting projects springing up to see if they can get many agents to effectively coordinate on a project. If anything, it would be useful to understand what failed and why so one can have an informed opinion.


I don't think it is unreasonable to ask where all the great AI built software is. There has been comments here on HN about people becoming 30 to 50 times more productive than before.

To put a statement like that into perspective (50 times more productive): The first week of the year about as much was accomplished as the whole previous year put together.


I haven't made any "great" software ever in my life. With AI or without.

But with AI assistance I've made SO MANY "useful", "handy" and "nifty" tools that I would've never bothered to spend the time on.

Like just last night I had Claude make a shell script on a whim that lets me use fzf to choose a running tmux session - with a preview of what the session's screen looks like.

Could I make it by hand? Yep. Would I have bothered? Most likely no.

Now it got done and iterated on my second monitor while I was watching 21 Bridges on my main monitor and eating snacks. (Chadwick Boseman was great in it)


I'd question your assumption that the software would be "great". I think we're seeing the volume of software increase faster than before. The average quality of the total volume of software will almost certainly decrease. It's not a contradiction for productivity in that respect to increase while quality decreases.

Well, if your produced value was 0 in the first place, multiplying that by a hundred will still be zero. Best example of that are claws: a lot of hype but just vapor, twitter fart at best.

I'm honestly not a big fan of when people throw out numbers implying a high degree of rigor without actually showing me evidence so I can judge for myself. If you're this much more productive, then use some % of that newly discovered productivity to show us.

But building software does tend to come with a lag even with AI. And we're also just more likely to see its influence in existing software first.

I'd rather be asking where it is AND actively trying to explore this space so I have a better grasp of the engineering challenges. I think there's just too many interesting things happening to be able to just wave it off.


The hard part about extracting patterns right now is that they shift every 2-4 months now (was every 6-12 month in 2024-2025). What works for you today might be obsolete in May.

In theory, there exist people who are exceptional at solving unique problems/challenges or managing things related to such endeavors. Some might specialize in certain classes of problems and gain experience solving variations for many companies. They might be both underutilized and underpaid in traditional companies for various reasons.

What if you built a company by recruiting such people and sold their expertise at a premium?

I also think assuming there's no real skill at any consulting company is probably a mistake. Or if anything, they're not just all "management consultants" and many of these places have tech consultancies as well. There are also tech companies that are basically specialized consultancies---compsec is probably a very visible area where it's a more common model and at least some firms get some respect for competence.

There's plenty of criticism for consulting firms and it can be very valid. You can probably even dig up stories of bad consulting experiences in the comments on HN.

But I've known people who worked at places where they didn't really have the talent to solve some unique problem, or their own people had caused the problems.

Good consultants will try to pick the brains of employees for insight that's been missed, ignored, or simply wasn't communicated well. They have have problem solving skills that overlap with a good software engineer, such as requirements gathering, communicating with managers, etc.


Maybe we shouldn't wish widespread harm on society to force them to "reassess their priorities" and engage in civilized dialogue instead.


> No-one really likes engineering war stories

Is that really true? I did keep reading the entire piece. I think they're often interesting and can contain nuggets of wisdom or insight. Or sometimes they're just funny. When I meet someone who worked on something interesting, I often start trying to pry stories like this post out of them.


Everyone likes engineering war stories!!! Never heard of an engineer who didn’t.


No, but it is amazing first sentence. Everybody goes, this story is specifically for me, I'm very special.


I read the piece (and enjoyed it) despite the first sentence. I’ve become increasingly sensitive to this kind of fluff.

It’s not a hook, it’s bad read-bait.


Well then you are very special.

Introverts hate this one weird trick!


Half the time I read the stories they're just a thinly disguised ad for some flavor the day SaaS, so at least in this instance the hook was somewhat useful. Now if everyone uses this to shill their SaaS, then maybe not.


LOL came here to say this exactly. Everyone LOVES war stories in my experience :)


Right, we're now in reality where the Senate is passing rescissions with a simple majority in addition to the President now doing "pocket rescissions". How do you negotiate in good faith about budget details if anything negotiated can be undone on a whim?


Why isn't simply getting another Claude account an option that you've tried before damaging your brain with low quality sleep?

Or writing prompts that get fired off by a script once the usage resets when sleeping so that you at least get some free tokies?

I'm sympathetic to wanting to squeeze out what you can to control costs, but this is something that might only seem sustainable because you're too exhausted to fully appreciate the potential deleterious long-term health effects.


I believe both behaviors violate the Terms of Service - it's generally frowned on to create multiple accounts to work around usage limits, and I know the TOS prohibited scripted interactions designed to maximize 24/7 usage (the subscriptions are very much based on the assumption that you will "be normal" about them)


And yet businesses seem to have no trouble paying for multiple accounts. I’m sure OP could register as a business or even recruit a friend to pay for an account on his behalf. I don’t think Anthropic cares as long as you’re paying them for the two accounts…


Business plans usually require a 5 seat minimum, charge per seat, and have different pricing levels - but yeah, nothing stops you from registering an LLC. Namecheap is even running a special: Buy a domain name and get an LLC for free: https://www.namecheap.com/apps/business-starter-kit/

(not affiliated, I was just very surprised when they tried to upsell me last time I renewed my domain :))


One problem with this is crypto AMM (automated market making) works best with stability and low volatility. For example, it's terrible in the context of prediction markets. Market makers get hosed due to real life, and traders (me) can profit at their expense. It's a big part of why prediction market traders encouraged Polymarket to develop orderbooks. And if crypto is viewed as disruptive, then it's likely inducing greater volatility.

A lot of these things are lucrative until they're not. If they are inherently lucrative then that profit will diminish as people catch on.


Every market has a use case, and AMMs are not solving event markets, event markets tried to use AMMs and successfully pivoted to order books. I think Polymarket's implementation still has liquidity challenges, as they still have to centrally bribe people to participate. Honestly I don't like Polymarket's contract at all, but it is fast and low cost. Bribes in the solidly AMM model I think were more efficient at attracting liquidity. Slight tangent, the oracle in Polymarket is a bigger issue, people need to convince them to lower the weight of UMA.

back to what I'm a fan of: CLMMs (Concentrated Liquidity Market Maker) is a very competitive field. The level of profits depends solely on volume and amount of capital participating. You are counting on other capital getting bored and moving away, as well as volume rising. Thats the game, it will always be the game. Its already "lucrative until its not" so its not really a gotcha or that insightful for those passing by. I'm glad you have some experience with it.


I don't think it necessarily leads to a of mastery of data structures and algorithms in the context of leetcode/modern coding interviews. One can do a lot of coding, and even be paid for it, for years and just not even encounter a lot of this material. Though one will have developed much of the same intuition that you typically acquire in a data structures class, it doesn't necessarily mean you're prepared to code mergesort on a whiteboard.


Not primarily the fault of the IRS, as they were just following the law passed in 2017 that didn't go into effect until years later. But there's a chance it gets changed back to the previous way by the same people who passed it.


This wasn't really on anyone's radar until more recently. I don't think even a simple majority of tech workers even realized this had happened until after the job market had tightened up.


I don't believe that's true. I remember gnashing of teeth about this during the Biden years.


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