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JumpCrisscrosstoday at 2:08 AM2 repliesview on HN

> Am I supposed to be impressed by this?

No. But it is noteworthy. A lot of what one previously needed a SWE to do can now be brute forced well enough with AI. (Granted, everything SWEs complained about being tedious.)

From the customer’s perspective, waiting for buggy code tomorrow from San Francisco, buggy code tonight from India or buggy code from an AI at 4AM aren’t super different for maybe two thirds of use cases.


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timrtoday at 2:56 AM

> A lot of what one previously needed a SWE to do can now be brute forced well enough with AI. (Granted, everything SWEs complained about being tedious.)

Only if you ignore everything they generate. Look at all the comments saying that the agent hallucinates a result, generates always-passing tests, etc. Those are absolutely true observations -- and don't touch on the fact that tests can pass, the red/green approach can give thumbs up and rocket emojis all day long, and the code can still be shitty, brittle and riddled with security and performance flaws. And so now we have people building elaborate castles in the sky to try to catch those problems. Except that the things doing the catching are themselves prone to hallucination. And around we go.

So because a portion of (IMO always bad, but previously unrecognized as bad) coders think that these random text generators are trustworthy enough to run unsupervised, we've moved all of this chaotic energy up a level. There's more output, certainly, but it all feels like we've replaced actual intelligent thought with an army of monkeys making Rube Goldberg machines at scale. It's going to backfire.

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utopiahtoday at 1:29 PM

> A lot of what one previously needed a SWE to do can now be brute forced well enough with AI.

I've never met those people. I've met a LOT of PM who tried. I've met a LOT of entrepreneur who also tried. They never cared, nor even understand, code. They only cared about "value" (and they are not necessarily wrong about it) so now they can "produce" something that does what need until it doesn't. When that's the case then they inexorably go back to someone else (might be a SWE, ironically enough, but might also be someone else like them they shift responsibility to, for money).

Brute force works until you have to backtrack, then it becomes prohibitively expensive until one has to actually grok the problem landscape. It's amazing for toy projects though, maybe.