Agree. Have worked in a codebase using Temporal, and is pretty much a nightmare. I don't know about the infra side, but from the developer side, all the abstractions they bring to the table are poorly designed. Wouldn't recommend
Biggest design bug imo is the workers need to register for the workflows they support, but will happily pull tasks from unrelated workflows if they're on the same queue. No way to put failed tasks back into the queue again either.
The problem with (propietary AI) is that they (anthropic/google/openai/etc) gain more from the usage of AI than you. Other tools like postgres, gcc, git, HTTP, emacs, etc. don't "gain" anything if you use them (well, they gain popularity and perhaps more contributions, but that's it). The more you use Claude, the richer anthropic gets and the easier for them to position themselves in a place of power, power to dominate the programming of the world. That's sad. So even we all like so much propiertary AIs, we should think twice what we are giving in exchange (and no, it's not just the $200/month what we are giving)
I'm all for open models, open source agents, etc. I don't want to give more power to the big corps, though. Imagine what software engineering could become in 5 years if all thse big corporations gain even more power over us. It's a terrifying scenario (e.g., pay more so we don't show you ads in between claude code prompts; pay more so that the produced code doesn't incrust ads in your app...). Do you really want the same shitty experience we have now in the global internet, but deeply ingrained in your software engineering workflows?
There were lots of proprietary database companies in the 70s-90s when they first came out (Oracle, IBM, Sybase, SQL Server), but these days open source databases are the default. Everyone's making so many wild predictions based off the current state of LLMs. We don't know how the market will unfold.
Even in regards to programming competency and the culture of vibecoding, it's similar to the early stages of electric cars where they fill some roles better than ICE engines, but it's still a decade away from doing the same job. And the whole time there was people trashing electric cars as a novelty/impractical/expensive/dangerous/etc because the infrastructure wasn't there yet and the technology was immature.
The only real moat pattern we see is datacenters being hotly in demand but even those will scale up and commoditize, RAM manufacturing will catch up etc.
The problem with (propietary AI) is that they (anthropic/google/openai/etc) gain more from the usage of AI than you. Other tools like postgres, gcc, git, HTTP, emacs, etc. don't "gain" anything if you use them (well, they gain popularity and perhaps more contributions, but that's it). The more you use Claude, the richer anthropic gets and the easier for them to position themselves in a place of power, power to dominate the programming of the world. That's sad. So even we all like so much propiertary AIs, we should think twice what we are giving in exchange (and no, it's not just the $200/month what we are giving)
> It really saddens me to see some developers talk about literally quitting their careers over AI, right when the benefits of existing deep technical experience have never been more valuable.
But that's not what senior executives think. That's all that matters. If they think that AI can replace engineers, so let it be. I mean, since when senior executives know shit about what quality means? They only care about revenue and profit. So yeah, you're right, but that's not gonna happen (sadly)
That’s very black and white. An org with a sizable enough engineer employment base will have leaders who understand that engineering is a deep discipline and quality matters, after all what they sell is an SLA.
Sure not all orgs are like that, but AI has not changed the calculus: fast / cheap / good, are tradeoffs long discussed before AI.
No one is reviewing the code. Managers don't want us to review code either. It's a bottleneck. If something goes wrong (bugs) they are fixed as they come. It's a very sad era of software engineering. If there ever was some engineering in our trade, now it's mostly gone. We are guessing around, writing "skills" files with "please, do not introduce bugs" or "you are an owner, not a renter" or similar stuff. It's just very low effort, very undeterministic. Big apps out there are going down constantly because of AI slop (e.g., Github), and we are seeing it more often as well in non-so popular systems (e.g., in my company and other saas that we use).
Product managers never cared about the code. Engineering managers don't care about code as much as they did when they were engineers. Directors couldn't care less about code. CTOs don't know what code looks like anymore. We are at the end of the chain, and somehow we always took pride of well written and maintainble code because we knew deep inside that good systems are built based on good code. But now we are jeopardizing ourselves, it's us the engineers who don't care anymore about code and with AI that problems is amplified.
Related: productivity has greatly increased over the last ~75 years, but wages have not increased anywhere near the same amount[0]. There is no reason for anyone besides CEOs (or similar positions) to care about productivity.
People are not idiots. AI benefits only the ones at the top of the chain, and the 10% of the rest of us. Are you in the top 10%? No, you typically are in the bottom 90%. So we don't want AI, we don't want the top getting richer at our expenses. We just want a job to bring bread home and keeping pushing our store while being "happy". You take that away from us, just so you can double your net worth, and well, bad things will start to happen
A lot of people in tech are probably in the 10%. But, the real problem is that AI doesn't even really help those in the top 10%. Maybe just barely, if you already accumulated your wealth. It's really closer to the top 5% who won't be particularly negatively affected.
The answer is obviously yes for the majority of HN readers. Hacker News is a site maintained by a huge venture capital fund for startup founders and employees and other venture capitalists plus a lot employees of FAANG and other big tech. You are preaching against the 10% to the 10%.
Definitely not the majority. Looking at the US, which is probably home to the most users of this website, the threshold for top 10% net worth is at $1.8m, and the threshold for top 10% income is $210k. There's many rich people like that here, but I think the average person is just a standard tech worker, maybe a senior, but not someone from a top company. They're overrepresented here, no doubt about that, but most people just aspire to be in the top 10% and defend the rich and ultra-rich because they dream of being just like them one day.
I'm choosing not to use wealth because wealth is a function of both time and income. Not everybody on Hacker News is the same age so it's hard to normalize; someone might reach that threshold if they were elderly even if their income was modest. I would understand if you disagreed though.
I think your value for income is for household income, not for individual income. My quick Google of top 10% individual income for the U.S. says it's $155k, which is well within the range of incomes for senior developers and other techies in the major metros even outside the tech hubs.
Because it would be sponsored by anthropic/google/openai? You cannot do it (typically) without paying for the tokens they only can offer. Programming used to be free, but slowly, we need to pay for every single line of code. It's sickening
Nobody has taken away the freedom to program like we used to. Punch cards may be more expensive now, but vim and emacs are still as free as they ever were.
There must be such a disconnection between the general people and more technical oriented people. I would never ever buy such a laptop. The reasons are very simple:
- it's owned by Google. Google is the worst tech company out there to trust your data
- it has AI all over the place. Overuse of AI depresses me. And a laptop is something very personal to me. I don't want to be depressed every time i open my laptop
- the "files" functionality is cloud-based. That's insane. I don't want my files in the "cloud". I want a file system
I run linux, and still own Macs (because their hardware is great on laptops). Of course I'm not the target audience. But still.
technical people are the ones that have built AI farms, stuffing AI on normies throat.
> files is cloud-based
was long gone. Seems you are assuming like Mac iCloud or iOS. There is plenty of local storage if you want to do that.
> Macs (because their hardware is great on laptops).
In other news, many other people don't have money but spend on overpriced macs (excl. neo) - so they buy cheap and cheerful - just works Chromebooks - for basic stuff. Normies also not need 3 x 8K monitors.
> And a laptop is something very personal to me. I don't want to be depressed every time i
Normal people wont use AI features. How many windows users are using copilot etc? many have accustomed to ignore - popup from AV or jumping triggers and just do to their basic stuff in computers.
It is just here in hn - everyday some blogpost - I used AI to completely automate this or that. this model is 1.27 times better that yesterdays model.
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