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iainctduncantoday at 6:16 PM2 repliesview on HN

There are an awful lot of programmers here essentially mocking this person for being naive and gullible, and yet the things I read programmers who are all in on vibe coding say are not that different, just a little less extreme. I'm seeing cases online nearly daily of people thinking their app is ground breaking or amazing when it's honestly a piece of barely thought out garbage and if they hadn't made it in a rush of "OMG I'm a genius with this tool" they'd know it.

I think coders ignore the insidious mental effects of these things at their peril and we would do well to ask ourselves if we are not likewise having our judgment altered by the intoxicating rush of LLM work and the subtle syncophancy of LLMs making them feel "insanely productive".

Cocaine and meth are also real productivity enhansers in the short term, but it doesn't mean they're a good fucking idea. There was a time when big companies were trying to convince everyone and their dog that life would be better, faster, and more productive with a little coke in the mix. Hell, I even saw more than a few people wreck themselves that way in the first dotcom era. :-/


Replies

keyboredtoday at 6:40 PM

HN has a 10X persona bias. (A bias. There are many personalities etc.) In turn one of the recurring memes is the AI-enabled Senior Developer who gets superpowers based on their experience. The junior developer, curiously, does not get superpowers, because they just lean on the machines and learn nothing. But the senior developer by the power of pre-AI experience (doing stuff) gets wings to fly with.

Regular people are just, I don’t know, I guess they are token whales waiting to get washed ashore.

Born just in the right time to both get experience doing stuff and also to experience wearing their wings. It’s that simple.

That’s the biggest thing for HN folks to at least be aware of.

yomismoaquitoday at 6:27 PM

The difference between those developers and this man is 100k.