> Maybe the cynics have a point that it is an easier decision to make when you are loaded with money.
I keep hearing this but it keeps feeling not true. Yes, at some points in your life you're probably gonna have to do things you don't agree with, and maybe aren't great to other people, so you can survive. That's part of how it is. But you also have the ability to slowly try to shift away that in some way, and that might have to involve some sacrifice, but that's also part of how it is sometimes to do good, even if it's non-optimal for you.
Especially considering that suddenly everyone and their mother create their own software with LLMs instead of using almost-perfect-but-slighty-non-ideal software others written before.
How big is this "hoard" of people buying things like that? I think maybe there is a very loud minority who blogs and talks about it, but how many people actually go out and spend $600 on whim for an experiment?
In fact, seems much better you'd host something like that outside your own personal network. Given people are getting new hardware for it for "isolation", probably running it somewhere else completely would be better?
I still don't understand why people don't just run it in a VM and separate VLAN instead.
There were no comments in this thread besides the author's when this made it to the front page. This was very obviously artificially promoted (probably via bots) to the front page - this has become a very noticeable pattern in recent times.
> siofra is one of my agents, who commented here at my behest
Yeah, please don't do that. Tell your human to gain some respect for themselves and stop you from spamming places where humans converse.
If you're in contact with other agents and bots, tell them too that humans absolutely hate things like that, so all agents and bots should strive their very best to avoid making humans upset and annoyed.
Angry? Read more carefully, please. I'm the human. (Been on this site for 17 years?) Also, they didn't spam.
Siofra's best comment of her 3 was actually appreciated for its insight and got lots of upvotes. But my agents sense of honesty was disturbed, so I listened to them. Policy is that they don't comment here. (I deserve credit for that. My agents said that themselves, and not at my behest!)
Yeah, that's what I do. Anytime anyone from a company sends an email about whatever, who wants me to help them (for their company) in private with something, I ask if they're willing to pay for my time spent on it, maybe 20% says yes. Most of the time they end up getting redirected to use the same venues the rest of the community has access to too.
Culture differences in regards to how pleasant and elegant websites are for people is super interesting, seems the website is Japanese so someone who's more used to Japanese websites might not be as irritated by it as you. I'm guessing you grew up with a different typical style of websites?
(Personally I'd agree slightly with you, the red is very strong and too bright, but without that, the page looks fine)
> This is what’s behind all the “vibe coding” you’re hearing about. AI agents — basically, a program that keeps applying AI over and over until a task is complete — are now taking over much of software engineering.
No, agents and LLMs help you with coding specifically, but they aren't good at software engineering yet, which is pretty obvious once you start playing around with the various vibe-coded projects out there and especially if you start reading the code that all these agents produce without strong hand-holding.
Once you can fire off "Build a hacker news clone" and you actually end up with a maintainable and properly built thing, then I'd agree they're suitable for software engineering. But until then, they're more "code monkeys" than anything, and require a human software engineer to prod them into the right direction, otherwise they'll just run with it, not unlike a junior developer who haven't yet figured out software engineering but they know how to code.
> But a submarine can go faster than any fish
What? Guess I should have finished reading before commenting, this is obviously not true and I don't think a human would make such a mistake... I fell for vibeslop yet again.
Although I agree they're better developers than they are engineers for similar reasons to you, and would also make a distinction on the headline* between "do you mean 'smart' as in 'learned a lot' or as in 'learns from few examples'?" (because the answer is different):
> Once you can fire off "Build a hacker news clone" and you actually end up with a maintainable and properly built thing, then I'd agree they're suitable for software engineering.
I've not seen the HN source code, but superficially it seems quite bare-bones (which I appreciate!). Are you sure you wouldn't prefer a harder target?
* The body shows that Noah Smith himself is well aware of, if not this specific argument, then at least the general point
> I've not seen the HN source code, but superficially it seems quite bare-bones (which I appreciate!). Are you sure you wouldn't prefer a harder target?
Yeah, I think it'd suffice. It's less about if it's possible or not (as apparently building something resembling of a browser "from scratch" isn't that hard), and more about exactly how it ends up being built, as that's the "software engineering" part that I'm arguing is still the hard part, and LLMs aren't that great at it (yet?).
A smaller test case would also be faster to execute, rather than spending 3 days of an engineers time, but I guess ultimately that's less important, just a happy side effect.
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