I take it….

Improvement over all the assholes that tell you „just google it” after you spent two days hitting the wall.

That’s what I find funny about „end of SaaS”.

If you are a graphic designer you are not going to make your own Photoshop. Even if you could ROI is not there.

Graphics designers of course are bad example because everyone will just generate images directly from LLMs.

But restaurant owner for example could build his own website with menu - heck even with just slapping html without LLM making a decent website was easy but these people didn’t have time for that.

I work in insurtech, wet dream of all big companies dealing with insurance was customer self service so they were building those interactive forms - but no customer wants to do the filling, they don’t care they don’t have time they are busy running their own business and they want to call or meet with someone who knows what needs to be filled in those forms. Chat with AI is not fixing that because business owner will have to spend his time answering all these questions that were in the form but only now it will be chatbot.

I think that in my career I have absolutely seen multiple times people making absolutely horrible architectural approaches where passing a parameter would suffice. Inventing and building basically whole universe instead of doing a bit of research.

With LLM coding I already have seen agent pointing out easier solutions because agent is not scared of or tired by reading existing code. Whereas most of developers want to write „their code” not read someone’s else’s code.

There are medical devices and stuff that will always require slow deliberate testing and changing.

If you have an application that real people use in everyday work and depend on stuff not moving under their feet. Execution speed is not something you aim for because you have to adjust to speed of users adopting changes.

As a startup owner of course you can’t really care about those people using your software because you have to pivot as quickly as possible to an investment that pays the most and boring every day app is not going to be a unicorn.

There is another option at the end of the spectrum. You aim at posthuman world where humans are not required and your software doesn’t have to bother with earning money or users that are slow or have emotions.

You can be when you are living in an apartment building and you hear how people who have a house get 0 electric bill or get negative electric bill.

Some people just want the world to burn…

It doesn't quite make up for it, but balcony solar is a possibility for apartments (with balconies obviously), provided they're permitted in your jurisdiction.

Better solution would be "not being petty asshole" and keeping in mind that in case of problems with power supply homeowners with solar panels might be useful.

So AI also thinks people somehow get away only with ORM without understanding SQL?

Funny thing is, that is always argument of „anti ORM” people.

I yet have to see someone actually argue that you don’t need to understand SQL and ORM will suffice in the wild. Then also find devs who can’t do a simple join as joins and index usage is not some black magic and is still required to use ORM properly.

> I yet have to see someone actually argue that you don’t need to understand SQL and ORM will suffice

Well that's because decades of bitter experience has told us all that object graphs rarely map cleanly to sets of relationships.

However, I do think that must have been the original idea as tools such as Hibernate tried so hard to obscure the underlying SQL and database. As a result all Hibernate objects have their own particular identity requirements which only made sense to a developer that knows what's going on under the hood.

I would still like some kind of proof.

Like an early article having headline "ORM will replace SQL knowledge".

I am professional dev for 15 years and hobbyist for 20 years and I might have missed something. But only thing I do remember was "anti ORM" people nagging how "one should really know SQL" - where I never heard anyone saying "don't learn SQL" maybe only NoSQL hype... but no one else.

I worked with people who argued that exact point and considered SQL outdated now that everything could be done with ORM.

Transistors do wear out. Not going to elaborate as it is easy to ask GPT

For me problem is that talking with developers most of the time is more annoying than it is worth.

Being one-upped all the time, having devs nag about tiny irrelevant flaws just to show who is smarter. Adding just one more sentence to keep upper hand and trying to „make better” when good wasn’t done yet.

When I was younger I also had my fair share of those flaws.

Insecure and overvalued jerks are toxic. If someone can't bring their ego under control and be professional, they're probably better absent or away from customers rather than keeping around.

The best developers are consultative, inquisitive, and focused on delivering value that makes stakeholders' lives easier. No one outside of technical people care about implementation tools or details.

Actually, I think all professional fields are similar. But even so, sometimes I still miss having people around

Ha, Ha, Very true though we don't like to admit it to ourselves.

HN is full of these types (myself included when something really triggers me). The amount of trivialities/nitpicking/arguing-for-the-sake-of-arguing going on here is enough to try anybody's patience. I think if i were to discuss things face-to-face with some of the people here it may most probably end in screaming/yelling and fisticuffs ;-)

It is a fundamental Human behavioural trait (i.e. the need to assert dominance through any means) that needs careful regulation in our communications.

I try to deal with these people the Sherlock Holmes way ;-)

"It may be that you are not yourself luminous, but you are a conductor of light. Some people without possessing genius have a remarkable power of stimulating it ...

When I said that you stimulated me I meant, to be frank, that in noting your fallacies I was occasionally guided towards the truth.".

> I think if i were to discuss things face-to-face with some of the people here it may most probably end in screaming/yelling and fisticuffs

I had the same feeling, until some years ago I met up with some local HNers and lo and behold; they're nothing like what's going on here typically, just regular people who can have regular (but interesting) conversations :)

I'm guessing for many it's really hard to "read the vibe" when it's just text, and people take everything very literally here, while in real life, even people who write and behave like that here, don't actually act the same.

Maybe facial expressions, body language and more basically solves all those trivialities/nitpicking/arguing-for-the-sake-of-arguing issue, at the very least because those who perpetrate those things, actually can see the "what the fuck is this guy on about" expressions in real-time as they speak to people. That's my guess at least.

They are one side of the equation; the other side is us i.e. our ego/character/personality. This factors into how we react to non-verbal cues and how we trigger the other side so now we are caught in a vicious negative cycle.

From that pov, eliminating everything other than pure text (like on HN) is actually a positive. Here we just need to agree to abide by some common rules for the pursuit of curiosity/knowledge and not mere socializing. Don't post everything that comes to your mind, slowdown and think before you post, know your audience, be succinct and to-the-point but with links to further details/study etc.

As an example, 19th century scientists wrote to each other sharing/discussing/refining their ideas/theories. See Explore 19th Century Scientific Correspondence - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47389055 for the actual and interesting correspondences.

IMO, the following quote very well expresses the power of mediocrity and how it can drag us all down;

“Your scorn for mediocrity blinds you to its vast primitive power. You stand in the glare of your own brilliance, unable to see into the dim corners of the room, to dilate your eyes and see the potential dangers of the mass, the wad of humanity. Even as I tell you this, dear student, you cannot quite believe that lesser men, in whatever numbers, can really defeat you. But we are in the age of the mediocre man. He is dull, colorless, boring — but inevitably victorious. The amoeba outlives the tiger because it divides and continues in its immortal monotony. The masses are the final tyrants. ... The roar of the plodders is inarticulate, but deafening. They have no brain, but they have a thousand arms to grasp and clutch at you, drag you down.”

― Trevanian, Shibumi

This is what we need to guard against i.e. "not become mediocre" (and add to the inanity on the Internet) in our own communications/behaviour on HN and elsewhere. We need to focus on the s/n ratio always in our communications.