4/13/2026 at 9:40:46 PM
This has mirrored what I've seen in my company. People in the data science/ML part of the company are super excited about AI and are always giving presentations on it and evangelizing it. Most engineers in other areas, though, are generally underwhelmed every time they try using it. It's being heavily pushed by AI "experts" and senior leaders, but the enthusiasm on the ground is lacking as results rarely live up to the extremely rosy promises that the "experts" keep making. Meanwhile, everyone can read the news about layoffs attributed to AI and can see that hiring (especially of junior engineers) has slowed to a trickle. You can only fool people for so long.by ike2792
4/13/2026 at 10:09:41 PM
> Meanwhile, everyone can read the news about layoffs attributed to AI and can see that hiring (especially of junior engineers) has slowed to a trickle.According to FRED/Indeed[1], software job openings have been roughly flat for 2-3 years, and they've actually been slightly increasing again. What data source are you looking at?
by tedsanders
4/14/2026 at 2:20:59 PM
They are increasing, but the level is still lower than it's been since Oct 2020. In my experience at two different companies since 2020, hiring more or less stopped sometime in 2022 to early 2023. In early 2025, some hiring started again but it's still a very low rate compared to pre-COVID, particularly for new college grads. While I don't believe that AI has actually taken any significant number of jobs in the software field, I do think it's being used as a convenient excuse by executives to lay people off. Regardless of the actual numbers though, the general perception in tech is "lots of layoffs are happening with not so much hiring" and "AI has something to do with it (either directly or as an excuse)."by ike2792
4/13/2026 at 10:13:39 PM
Flat at 60% of pre-covid hiring while the number of graduates continue to increase and there's still a backlog of people who were laid off. That's not a particularly optimism inducing hiring market.by Macha
4/14/2026 at 1:03:51 AM
Do not with a straight face act like pre-COVID hiring levels were a Good Thing. They weren’t. They were a symptom of a broken economy that you personally happened to pretty directly benefit from.by UqWBcuFx6NV4r
4/14/2026 at 1:10:38 AM
I think it's much better for society for companies to overhire than underhire, especially when they can easily afford it.by archagon
4/14/2026 at 1:38:01 AM
This is an idealistic view and makes hiring seem like charity.There will always be steep corrections when they overhire driven by economic cycles or otherwise (and we're living through an otherwise).
by spoonyvoid7
4/14/2026 at 1:41:39 AM
Thing is, the companies doing these layoffs rarely actually end up losing money from overhiring. They’re still profitable. Just not profitable enough for the people on top.That’s a bit perverse. In democracies, corporations ultimately exist to serve society, not shareholders.
by archagon
4/14/2026 at 7:16:55 AM
I think you are correct in asserting the mercy-disciple of market forces.I also think that counter points on the inhumanity of firms, misses that economies are an objective way to structure incentives to achieve subjective ends.
If you want more money to travel to other parts of the pyramid, or you want to disincentivize certain behavior, then economic incentives can be set up to achieve those goals.
Expecting firms to do charity is pointless. Expecting firms to optimize under constraints is not.
by intended
4/14/2026 at 2:23:38 AM
The plutocracy is forgetting that a working and productive populace - with fair wages and representation - is their end of the deal for disproportionally benefitting from the fruits of labor from others; and directly prevents violence against the status quo. See: The top articles in the last 3 days.by HaZeust
4/14/2026 at 8:04:07 AM
Sure, but all they have to do is not hold up their end of the bargain. Who enforces that? These are just norms from 60 years ago that the rich decided they no longer have to follow.by genxy
4/14/2026 at 1:53:00 AM
That's the problem, they can't afford itby mixdup
4/14/2026 at 1:54:54 AM
They can afford it. They just want to make even more profit.by archagon
4/13/2026 at 11:27:14 PM
There have been a lot of headlines the past couple years about companies stating they are doing layoffs or slowing hiring because of AI. I would bet the average adult pays way more attention to news headlines than FRED reports.I also don't see why everyone would dismiss the statements of large company CEOs about why they are making hiring/firing decisions, regardless of what some statistics say.
by rurp
4/13/2026 at 11:55:02 PM
Because the messaging of the CEOs is intentional, to both do 'damage control' and influence stock price / valuation. It's not neutral messaging.by Insanity
4/14/2026 at 7:21:10 AM
Yet, that is what the markets are operating on.Dismissing their words, just brings us back to the issue of what is really going on.
And lest it is forgotten - AI is a huge part of the US economy at this point. It is highly dependent on firms spending tokens.
Saying it’s just CEO market speak means we have an AI bubble that is more worrisome.
by intended
4/13/2026 at 10:12:41 PM
The companies doing the layoffs are themselves stating AI as a reason; that’s the news people are responding to. The parent didn’t claim that it’s based on reality, but it informs public opinion.by layer8
4/13/2026 at 10:13:44 PM
Quite a convenient excuse, isn't it? I hope no one figures out that AI is still just kinda meh.by daveguy
4/14/2026 at 1:04:59 AM
“I’ll take a CEO’s very calculated word for something if it supports my existing worldview” is intellectually dishonest.by UqWBcuFx6NV4r
4/14/2026 at 1:26:55 AM
Whether or not the CEOs' statements are true, they affect public opinion.You have CEOs claiming that AI is driving layoffs alongside CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI talking about the end of white collar work. All this is then amplified by tech journalists like Casey Newton and Kevin Roose. The biggest public proponents of AI keep telling people that it will take their jobs.
What comes after the end of jobs? Who knows. Sam Altman occasionlly making vague statements about curing cancer. There are vague hand-waving notions of a Star Trek utopia.
But to be honest it feels more like a Cyberpunk future, where the Altmans and Musks get to live cancer-free and the rest of us eek out an existence without jobs or any prospect for a better life. Or maybe it looks more like Star Trek, but we're all red shirts.
Can you blame people for hating this?
by moregrist
4/14/2026 at 2:07:47 AM
Anything Musk or Altman say is just about raising money. Nothing they say can be taken at face value. There’s a funny interview with Mark Anderseen, where he talks about how he never looks backwards and doesn’t have any sense of introspection and then gets into a rambling and completely wrong history lesson. That’s what these guys do.The better question to ask is what happens after the end of OpenAI/Tesla/etc? AI may take your job away, but not because of robots replicating your labor, just good old-fashioned economic collapse.
by Spooky23
4/14/2026 at 8:33:58 AM
Blame then then. Simple as that. Lying to "just raise money" is one of the most harmful ways of lying. It distorts the whole economy.> There’s a funny interview with Mark Anderseen, where he talks about how he never looks backwards and doesn’t have any sense of introspection and then gets into a rambling and completely wrong history lesson. That’s what these guys do.
Yes, we know they are psychopaths and assholes. The blame is on them.
by watwut
4/13/2026 at 11:46:31 PM
>According to FRED/Indeed[1], software job openings have been roughly flat for 2-3 years, and they've actually been slightly increasing again.None of this contradicts OP's claim, because at least anecdotally, juniors/interns are getting disproportionately squeezed by AI. Why hire an intern to write random scripts/tests for you, when claude code does the same thing? Therefore overall job posting could be flat or slightly rising, but that's only because everyone is rushing to hire senior/principals staff to wrangle all the AI agents, offsetting the junior losses.
by gruez
4/13/2026 at 11:51:14 PM
I thought the main value of juniors was that you grow them into seniors, not really the random scripts they write?by MidnightRider39
4/14/2026 at 6:54:49 AM
That is the value of other companies doing that and you going to poach those new seniors. With the money you saved not training those juniors you can offer better salaries and still have higher profits.by Paradigma11
4/14/2026 at 1:05:58 AM
I want to agree with you but when was this ever true?by adithyassekhar
4/14/2026 at 2:09:50 AM
It was true when I started to work in this industry ~8 years ago. But of course YMMV especially depending on country and companyby MidnightRider39
4/14/2026 at 12:34:27 AM
"Opening" doesn't mean anything. An actual job where someone is working and is being paid a salary means something.by confidantlake
4/13/2026 at 11:27:18 PM
Is that data useful at all? Indeed postings are a poor proxy for how many people actually get hired. One of the major problems we have is that employment statistics are largely just estimates, and don’t reflect reality on the ground. Factor in the Trump admin firing most of the BLS and other agencies for not giving him the numbers he wants, and there really is no reliable data.by mcmcmc
4/14/2026 at 12:52:22 AM
Complete crap.by confidantlake
4/13/2026 at 10:11:58 PM
Separately, I'm curious how that URL (IHLIDXUSTPSOFTDEVE) is encoded.by latchkey
4/13/2026 at 10:58:16 PM
IHL (Indeed Hiring Lab) + IDX (Index) + US (country) + TP (topic) + SOFTDEVE (software development)by variety8675
4/13/2026 at 10:32:08 PM
[dead]by treetalker
4/14/2026 at 7:12:37 AM
Software job openings are mostly bullshit. Companies post ghost jobs en masse, while refusing to hire people. You can ask anyone that's had to look for a job recently and see how bad the market is.by fzeroracer
4/13/2026 at 10:36:58 PM
[dead]by xg15
4/13/2026 at 10:06:23 PM
I feel like the junior problem contributes more heavily than people might think. The people on top see juniors as replaceable since they view them as cheap menial labor, whereas most seniors at least acknowledge the human element as part of the benefitby mghackerlady
4/13/2026 at 10:12:07 PM
Today's juniors are tomorrow's seniors, or more importantly today's seniors' yesterday.They do the dirty, repetitive work, learn the systems inside out, take note of the flaws, and fix them if they are motivated and the system/process allows.
Thinking them as replaceable, worthless gears is allowing your organization rot from inside. I can't believe people can't see it.
by bayindirh
4/13/2026 at 10:15:43 PM
Plenty of people see it - but, to a hiring team, a junior is an extremely risky investment. They demand a high cost relative to when they can start contributing actual value, may not work out, or may hop ship the moment they become competent. It is rational for a business to want to eliminate this risk. It's possible that everyone is acting rationally here, knowing it will lead to a result that is not favorable down the line - because the immediate benefit is too great to consider the latter.In other words the gamble of hiring expensive juniors with shiny degrees is greater to them than the gamble of not having competent seniors a few years down the line. And that risk may be overblown - people are still hiring some juniors, it's not like it has stopped entirely - so future seniors will likely just be worth more than they are currently. To some, that may be worth the risk, especially if you believe AI will continue to get stronger.
I am not saying I agree with this decision making, more pointing out the thought process. We have had to have similar discussions where I am but are still hiring juniors, FYI. That's basically all we're hiring right now, actually, because the market for strong juniors is very good right now.
by JohnMakin
4/14/2026 at 1:25:27 AM
It's not an economic decision, it's a cultural one. Are you investing to build something useful and sustainable? Or are you exploiting for a profitable quarter?I read someone compare the mindset to that of a drug-dealer. In any given neighborhood, a handful of people get very wealthy, at the expense of the stability and potential of everyone else. Our elite are drug-dealers - literally, in some cases. And conditions are deteriorating about how you'd expect.
by underlipton
4/14/2026 at 7:22:41 AM
Benefitting from creating externalities and harming the commons.by intended
4/13/2026 at 10:26:10 PM
> In other words the gamble of hiring expensive juniors with shiny degrees is greater to them than the gamble of not having competent seniors a few years down the line.I mean, writing the code which makes mon^H^H^H^H provides value for minimum cost is the ultimate goal of a software company, but any competent CS grad or anyone with basic algorithms knowledge knows that greedy algorithms can't solve all problems. Sometimes the company needs to look ahead, try, fail and backtrack.
Nerdy analogies aside, self-sabotaging whole sector with greedy shortsightedness is a pretty monumental misstep. It's painful yet unbelievably hilarious at the same time. Pure dark comedy.
by bayindirh
4/13/2026 at 10:42:18 PM
The problem is that it's systemic. The entire system rewards the short term thinking, so that even people with some awareness of what's happening tend to contribute to it all. People are fantastically good at finding reasons to work at places like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Palantir, X, etc. And once they're there, they similarly figure out how to justify the actions they're taking.by antonvs
4/13/2026 at 10:34:41 PM
and what happens in half a generation or so when those seniors start retiring? the only way software production will meet demand is if the fewer seniors out there are propped up by way more competent ai than we have now. that also means the work will fundamentally change from being massively nerdy to moderately nerdy with the ability to work with ai. many of the people in the computer industry now just wont be attracted to that type of work.. what will they do? become physicists or mathematicians? and what type of person is tomorrows senior software developer?edit: maybe todays computer nerds will become tomorrows backyard hackers, the only ones able to beat the ai.
by globalnode
4/14/2026 at 12:04:25 AM
If people need to be retained for many years, is the solution to give a bunch of stock that vests over many years? It would be interesting if such incentives (the need to hang onto talent that has been incubated for many years) could bring about a return to one-company careers.by apparent
4/13/2026 at 10:19:44 PM
> Thinking them as replaceable, worthless gearsThis is how companies see all of us though, for all ic levels
by tayo42
4/13/2026 at 10:22:03 PM
For today's fast and loose companies that's true, but not all companies are greedy and grind people for money.Yes, they're not the norm, many of them are not glamorous, but it's not all black and white.
by bayindirh
4/13/2026 at 10:26:46 PM
not just fast and loose though… I bet the number of companies who are not drowning in “AI strategies” meetings is roughly equal to number of ICE Agents who are Democratsby bdangubic
4/14/2026 at 1:17:30 AM
This would have been a great revelation for decision-makers across the economy to have had about 20 years ago. Instead, they took every opportunity to turn the job market into the Hunger Games. Congrats to the people who survived the Cornucopia; the rest of us have been bleeding out for well over a decade.by underlipton
4/14/2026 at 1:41:40 AM
It's not that juniors are replaceable, but that hiring them is a high variance move. Few, if any, know whether a candidate is just memorizing leetcode and is going to be a dud, costing you effort before they get a PIP, or you are hiring a very talented individual that will be contributing in 2 weeks . With seniors, you risk less, just because the track record makes the very worst candidates unlikely.by hibikir
4/13/2026 at 10:44:38 PM
> but the enthusiasm on the ground is lackingUsing claude and friends takes all the fun out of the job, so I'm not surprised engineers are not enthusiastic. It's cool for 1 month then you realize we went from solving problems and implementing algos and optimizing slow code and fixing security issues and other fun stuff, to writing prompts all day long.
by ggregoire
4/13/2026 at 10:49:35 PM
Not a universal view: Claude has added all the fun back into my job.by dboreham
4/14/2026 at 1:13:04 AM
Many engineers want nothing more than to eventually become managers. So this is not surprising. But your job is not what it was before.by archagon
4/14/2026 at 2:16:56 AM
Not really managers, I would put the new role more in the senior engineer / architect category. Those still have to deal with deeply technical things like design, architecture, problem decomposition, research, domain expertise, code review, collaborating with technical peers -- all of which (people) managers don't typically do.If you ever wanted to climb the senior technical ladder, this is now the quickest way to experience it. Except instead of other people you get to work with agents which, while a very different experience, requires largely the same skills.
So yes, your job is not what it was before, but with career growth it typically was not anyway.
by keeda
4/14/2026 at 12:43:27 AM
... but a very common one. There are always exceptions to every ruleby kakacik
4/14/2026 at 1:06:42 AM
Oh yeah? The way that you feel is the norm, and if anyone feels differently, they’re the exception? And that’s just based on… vibes?by UqWBcuFx6NV4r
4/13/2026 at 10:26:26 PM
The use-cases for data science and other engineers are different. AI is not uniformly good at all kinds of development.There is an issue with execs pushing it though. You have people at the top of the company with little to no idea how people work attempting to micromanage tool usage. It is as if you had a group of execs determining what IDEs people could use.
No-one is getting fired because of AI. The start of this year is the start of companies beginning to use AI. The reason layoffs are happening is because of the massive overhiring after Covid.
by skippyboxedhero
4/13/2026 at 10:51:05 PM
> overhiring after CovidHow long after COVID are we going to be able to keep using this excuse? This is starting to feel like the politician blaming his predecessor even though he's been in office for years. In the year 2033, Company X lays off another 10,000, just as it did each year since 2023, again blaming massive over-hiring during COVID, ten years ago.
by ryandrake
4/13/2026 at 10:55:30 PM
> How long after COVID are we going to be able to keep using this excuse?I am with you but if you look what happened after COVID it is a big line going waaaaay up. COVID was a significant event and there is no way around it, no? the OPs comment is invalid because we below the pre-COVID (by miles) but COVID should be taken into account (everyone seems to use it to further some agenda by looking at just one particular aspect of what happened post-COVID)
by bdangubic
4/13/2026 at 10:58:05 PM
> It is as if you had a group of execs determining what IDEs people could use.
by andrekandre
4/14/2026 at 1:50:29 AM
Covid was six years ago man. Don't insult people's intelligence.by noobermin
4/13/2026 at 10:09:26 PM
I have a similar experience. I seldom use it to test to see its current state, and it generally (85% of the time) gives wrong answers. Then I discuss this with a couple of friends: Me: I tried $AI recently, I asked $question, it hallucinated.
Them: But it sucks at that.
Me: Then what's good at? It's useful if it helps me out of a ditch.
Them: It depends on the domain...
At the end of the day, I don't plan to use this at daily capacity, but with all the resources poured into this, it's still underwhelming.
by bayindirh
4/13/2026 at 10:17:56 PM
A friend of mine has copilot integrated with his storage appliance that all the business docs are hosted on for his firm. He says it's amazing.My company uses Sharepoint, and can digest all of the documents I have access to on that, one drive, teams, outlooks, etc. across my tenant. Most of the time, it's pretty useless.
There must be some reason for these two disparate experiences. It's the same product offering. I couldn't tell you.
by RajT88
4/13/2026 at 10:41:54 PM
Reminds me of a bounty I received recently. Someone essentially exposed a bedrock agent that had access to the companies internal documents to the internet unauthenticated. They actually had the reports and notes for other bug bounties that had been reported to them as well.by ofjcihen
4/13/2026 at 10:26:17 PM
I mean, anything with Sharepoint will be terrible. No amount of AI can fix that mess.by matwood
4/14/2026 at 12:12:30 AM
I too feel this way.by RajT88
4/13/2026 at 10:43:03 PM
Tell claude what you do and ask it where it can be the most helpful. It is true that the tool has to be learned, and won't help everywhere. If you are doing web dev just to make a tool, it is purely magical. I've found it to be mostly useless in making geed helm charts.by scottyah
4/13/2026 at 10:53:11 PM
I generally use them for researching things which I was unable to find anywhere else. For example, for Gemini I have two extreme examples:I asked for a concept in Tango music, with a long prompt explaining what I'm looking for. It brought me back a single, Spanish YouTube Video explaining it perfectly alongside its slightly wrong summary, but the video was spot on, and I got what I needed.
Then I asked for something else about a musical instrument, again with a very detailed prompt, and it gave me a very confident answer suggesting that mine is broken and needs to be serviced. After an e-mail to the maker of the said instrument, giving the same model number (and providing a serial) and asking the same question, I got a reply saying that it's supposed to that and it's perfectly fine, it turned out that Gemini hallucinated pretty wildly.
For programming I don't use AI at all. I have a habit of reading library references and writing code directly by RTFM'ing the official docs of what I'm working with. It provides more depth, and I do nail the correct usage in less time.
by bayindirh
4/14/2026 at 12:43:15 AM
The opposite happened to me. I asked Gemini about a type of Vietnamese dance called "nhảy sạp" and it returned a good sounding summary along with a video it claimed to explain the dance and how it worked. The video was from the Knowledge Academy and titled, "What is SAP?"by alamortsubite
4/14/2026 at 7:17:44 AM
The second example I have given is no different than yours, actually.by bayindirh
4/13/2026 at 9:54:36 PM
For mine it’s worse because we have new leadership who believes in it to a far larger extent than it can deliver. Now a massive amount of our workforce is building up proofs of concepts and spitting out tons of effectively useless output to look good because of how strongly they’ve signaled it’s good for careers here to fully embrace it. It’s a massive mess and there’s nobody to clean it up, and the voices advocating for rigor or good engineering practices are being sidelined.It’s full out mania. As someone raised in and who escaped a cult, I am having to use every tool in my very large toolbox to stay sane while I wait for this to pass and die down or make my move towards a place that still cares whether their product works.
by taurath
4/13/2026 at 11:14:27 PM
If the majority of engineers decide to rot their brains and abandon best practices, the industry will eventually implode. Stay true to your beliefs and use the bare minimum of AI to keep your job.We’re in what I would call the “dark ages” of tech. There will be a new renaissance led by those who used this as an opportunity to build skills and tools that are genuinely useful and ingenious.
If you keep a long-term horizon this is the perfect opportunity to work on a solo project in stealth mode. Or build professional connections with others who see things the way you do.
by therobots927
4/14/2026 at 1:09:35 AM
“What I would call […]”.When people talk about one’s salary being an imperative to them understanding something, they are talking about exactly you. “This’ll all wash over and we’ll be back to the good old days that I’m used to” has never happened. Ever.
by UqWBcuFx6NV4r
4/14/2026 at 5:55:58 AM
At my company everyone’s salary and career ladder are determined by exactly how much they dive into AI and show enthusiasm for it, regardless of whether they’re using it for something useful or they’re just competing for how much money they can burnby taurath
4/14/2026 at 1:35:51 AM
Well actually it did happen. Greco-Roman intellectual tradition was lost when Rome collapsed and institutions of knowledge with it. Islamic scholars preserved much of this knowledge during the dark ages but in the western world Christian religious dogma reigned supreme.During the renaissance western thinkers pieced together lost information and we got the scientific revolution.
Kind of wild that you completely ignored the example I gave of exactly this happening in my original comment.
And speaking of people whose salary dictates their understanding of something, let’s talk about Sam Altman and the rest of SV currently spinning a fairytale about AI which just so happens to justify astronomical valuations for their companies.
by therobots927
4/13/2026 at 9:59:51 PM
[flagged]by Wissenschafter
4/13/2026 at 10:06:40 PM
AI isn't going away, but leadership expectations to (say) increase "efficiency" by 50% in the next 6 months through "AI" will. Eventually. After lots of fudging of numbers and general reluctance to admit that the Emperor's clothes are looking awfully translucent.by decimalenough
4/14/2026 at 12:42:18 AM
I've been waiting so long for it to become commonplace for people to equate AI with The Emperor's New Clothes. Hopefully it gains steam.by suttontom
4/13/2026 at 10:15:31 PM
If LOC and tokenmaxxing is the future, nobody will have a job.I use AI all day every day, I’m not a luddite, I’m someone who has seen people take the same shitty shortcuts to working systems they are now. They’re wasting tons of money and smarter competitors who can actually think clearly about the benefits and costs are gonna eat their lunch.
by taurath
4/13/2026 at 10:03:24 PM
Early stages of any major disruptive technology will have hype due to get-rich-quick folks. Dot-com boom & bust of 2000 is similar. But the underlying technology (internet) defined our lives forever.I don't know why people are comparing the Day-1 of one technology with the Day-1000 of another. Yes, AI is useless in many fields - NOW. But you can't imagine doing any work without in a couple years.
Like the kids used to ask - 'How did they build Google without Google?'
Now their kids will ask - 'How did they build chatGPT without chatGPT'?
by partyficial
4/14/2026 at 4:50:32 AM
ChatGPT has been around for 4 years at this point. Not very long, but I’ve heard of the ‘imagine what it’ll do in one year’ spiel quite a few times by now.by sph
4/14/2026 at 4:57:24 AM
How long was the internet around before it became essential for every day life?by partyficial
4/14/2026 at 6:39:16 AM
The “Internet” was a DARPA-funded research curiosity initially. It was not crammed down people’s throats like a roll of Oreos while advocates screamed that, “You like this, right‽ This is the future! You have to like this, what is wrong with you?”Transformers were treated like any other ML technique until Sutskever decided to just go big on training it. That it can look like a compelling simulacrum, I am not arguing, but this thing left the ivory tower of research prematurely and recklessly. We are all going to pay for it.
by Eufrat
4/13/2026 at 10:23:48 PM
2 things - it’s not day 1 for AI, and it’s also not dot-com (which dropped the nasdaq 80% btw). It’s the entire American economy right now. When it can’t deliver anything approaching its hype, just like all the data centers that can’t deliver on power, the profit margins that can’t deliver, and the promises of massive 500% revenue increases this fiscal year… sorry, I was raised in a cult and know what the fuck I’m seeing, sadly among a lot of otherwise intelligent people here.I expect I’ll be using LLMs now and in the future, but the public is far more right about the companies and the people running them than the tech “insiders” here.
by taurath
4/13/2026 at 10:05:08 PM
How can the AI be lacking in results and also at the same time responsible for layoffs and slowing of hiring?Wouldn't it be one or the other?
by FloorEgg
4/13/2026 at 10:11:06 PM
You replace half of a team with AI. Salary cost go immediately down, but team output can keep up for some time. You don't see the technical debt, the security issues and the prompt injection which will result in wrong invoices being sent. In six months suddenly there will be a big problem, but this quarter a lot of shareholders are happy about the cost-cutting. You may even be promoted by the time shit hits the fan, and it won't even be your problem anymore.On the other hand there probably also is a general correction in the market after the covid hiring spree.
by V__
4/13/2026 at 11:17:37 PM
Almost sounds like the "walking ghost phase" during radiation poisoning...https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1975oj/whats_ha...
by xg15
4/14/2026 at 9:23:19 AM
This is such a good metaphor.by V__
4/14/2026 at 4:53:05 AM
Fantastic analogy. I dare say it applies to our current economy as well.by sph
4/13/2026 at 10:57:51 PM
You assume CEOs are completely rational actors.The reality is most of them are so divorced from reality that they think they are infallible and AI will pick up the slack because they want it to be true.
by sumeno
4/13/2026 at 10:08:22 PM
No, layoffs happen due to leadership’s expectations. It’s never been about reality, layoffs and both massive hiring to ramp teams are based on vibes.The lack of results is felt by those using it to assist with their work daily.
by californical
4/13/2026 at 10:19:35 PM
And specifically, their expectations as to what will positively impact the stock price. Shareholder value this quarter is more important than keeping the company afloat next quarter.by bigbuppo
4/13/2026 at 10:07:25 PM
Executives don't need actual results or data to lay people off.by pesus
4/13/2026 at 10:49:05 PM
AI could be a huge net benefit, and justify large layoffs.AI could be a huge short-term benefit, justify layoffs now, so long as you (the exec doing the laying off) don't have to worry about the long term
AI could have middling net benefit, but be a great excuse to justify layoffs now. In this scenario, the people laid off and those that remain bear the cost (one, losing their jobs; those that remain, burning out with the extra workload) etc etc, many scenarios to consider...
by throwyawayyyy
4/13/2026 at 10:08:13 PM
It can be both if for the majority of layoffs, AI is just a scapegoat to act as cover for cuts made for financial reasons or offshoring and not the actual cause.by cosmic_cheese
4/13/2026 at 10:09:39 PM
But then you’d expect the trend to self correct in the long run. AI actually does seem to replacing customer-service and CS jobs effectively.by JumpCrisscross
4/13/2026 at 10:28:19 PM
From what I've seen many efforts to replace roles such as customer service with AI are being rolled back or downscaled due to intolerably high error rates and general incapability. While these segments won't come out unscathed I don't think the actual impact will end up being as severe as feared.by cosmic_cheese
4/13/2026 at 10:40:01 PM
I believe that too. Broadly, I’m agreeing with the parent comment—AI can’t be causing long-run layoffs and be worthless.by JumpCrisscross
4/13/2026 at 11:56:07 PM
You're apparently assuming that AI related layoffs are rational, based on those making the decisions having good information about what their own organizations are achieving with AI.I think this is far from the truth. In many companies AI has become a religion, not a new technology to be evaluated and judged. Employees are told to use AI, and report how much they are using, and all understand the consequences of giving the wrong answer. The CEO hears the tales of rampant AI use and productivity that he is demanding to hear, then pats himself on the back and initiates another layoff. Meanwhile in the trenches little if anything has actually changed.
by HarHarVeryFunny
4/14/2026 at 12:08:15 AM
> assuming that AI related layoffs are rationalNope. I’m saying if firms lay off on the assumption of AI gains that never come, they’ll be beaten by firms who don’t.
by JumpCrisscross
4/14/2026 at 12:22:56 PM
OK, but your post reads as if you think that AI being the cause of layoffs can't be true if AI is "worthless" (less capable than they are assuming), which is false.CEOs are laying off because of AI because they think it will save them money, but are doing so based on misinformation, largely due their own insistence that everyone uses AI, and report how much they are using - they are just hearing what they asked to hear (just like Mao hearing about impossible levels of rice production during the "Great Leap Forward"). I'm not making this up - I've seen it first hand.
You can see the proof of this - companies laying of because of what they mistakenly believe AI can do - in companies like Salesforce, forced to do an embarassing U-turn and hire people back when the reality sets in. At least Salesforce were quick to correct - most big companies are not so nimble or ready to admit their own mistakes.
We seem to have reached mania-like levels of rice-production reporting, with companies like Meta now taking AI token usage as a proxy for productivity and/or a measure of something positive, and apparently having a huge leaderboard displaying who is using the most (i.e. spending the most money!). The only guaranteed outcome of this is that they will indeed see massive use of tokens, and a massive AI bill, and then in a year or so will likely be left scratching their heads wondering why nothing much appears to have changed.
by HarHarVeryFunny
4/13/2026 at 11:05:37 PM
Might be true, but unfortunately, we need to pay for rent/mortgage/groceries in the short run.by fwip
4/13/2026 at 10:11:22 PM
When Block laid off 40% of their staff Jack Dorsey said it was because of AI. Whether or not you believe him is a different question.by janalsncm
4/13/2026 at 10:24:59 PM
He went all in on block chain, so it would be consistent with previous hyped tech. In this case I would believe him.by tayo42
4/13/2026 at 10:15:06 PM
Not if the actual vs stated reasons for the layoffs have nothing to do with AI.by plemer
4/13/2026 at 10:10:32 PM
Organisations happy to reduce costs, perhaps with greater output but with lower quality?by incompatible
4/14/2026 at 2:06:00 AM
and surely, all of those companies are being entirely truthful about the reason for the layoffs.by notatoad
4/13/2026 at 10:09:03 PM
can happen at the same time when businesses speculatively fire workers to replace with AI. The lack of results might bite them in the ass and the bubble might pop. Or not, but they are going long on their AI positionby samrus
4/13/2026 at 10:09:32 PM
AI hype -> layoffs -> AI underperforms -> ????Hilariously, it's the exact same playbook as the big third-world-country-outsourcing hype from a few years ago.
by parliament32
4/14/2026 at 2:01:08 AM
Funny, I was supposed to be the expert in my company, but I was run over by the demo folks, while I was uselessly preaching about evaluation, safeguards, guardrails, observability.by elzbardico
4/13/2026 at 10:30:51 PM
I totally understand where you are coming from and my personal take is LLMs are to "stuff" as a drill driver is to a screw driver. They are a tool, just a tool. ... bear with ...I over floored several rooms in my house (UK, '20s build) with plywood before laying insulation, heating mats and laminate floor boards for the final finish. I don't have a staple gun so I screwed the boards down at roughly 600mm c/c across the floorboards and 300mm along them.
What the blazes has that got to do with LLMs?
Well, I used a nearly inappropriate method for a job and blasted through it nearly as fast as the best method! If I had used a manual screwdriver I would have been at it nearly forever and ended up with a very limp wrist. I do own an old school ratchet screwdriver and that would have speeded things up but still been slow. I did use yellow passivated screws with sharp threads and a notch to initiate biting into the wood - rather more expensive than a staple or a nail.
So I burned through my tokens (screws instead of nails/staples) faster than if I had used a pneumatic nail/staple gun.
Anyway. LLMs are tools. They can be good tools in the right hands or rip your fingers off in the wrong hands.
by gerdesj
4/13/2026 at 11:28:23 PM
Running with this analogy, the two sides of the AI argument are the people who think they can fire their plumber and electrician now that they have a drill driver, and the people who know it doesn't work that way...by socialcommenter
4/13/2026 at 11:58:40 PM
Quite. My larger drill driver will wrench your wrist unless you know how to set the speed/mode/etc correctly and know how to brace yourself correctly.At the moment, I think that a LLM needs skilled hands too. Have a casual chat - that's fine but for work ... be aware.
I recently dumped a wikimedia (our knowledge base is a wiki) formatted table into a LLM (on prem) and asked it to sort the list on the first column. It lost a few rows for some reason. No problem - I know how my tools work but it was a bit odd!
by gerdesj
4/13/2026 at 10:11:50 PM
Your statement is a bit contradictory. That is, the article about "the growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone else" pretty clearly states that "everyone else" is scared about job losses and the extreme inequality they see advanced AI causing. This is in line with your second to last sentence.But the first part of your comment is basically saying "AI insiders think the tech is super awesome and powerful, while other engineers think it doesn't stand up to the hype." Well, if the AI is indeed not as good a tech as its boosters are saying, well, this would be great news for everyone scared about job losses and widening inequality if AI turned out to be a nothing burger.
by hn_throwaway_99
4/14/2026 at 4:56:51 AM
No and it has been said already elsewhere in this thread: decision makers are not entirely rational, they might fire entire departments even if the AI revolution isn’t here quite yetby sph
4/13/2026 at 11:01:24 PM
I get it, but as a "AI expert and senior leader" myself in my 1,000 people organization (in relative terms), the disconnect I have is:A lot of what non-believers say matches "enthusiasm on the ground is lacking as results rarely live up to the extremely rosy promises". They would then say they need 2 weeks to work on a specific project, the good old way, maybe with some light AI use along the way.
But then I'm like "hmm actually let me try this real quick" and I prompt Claude for 3 minutes, and 30 minutes later it has one-shotted the whole "two weeks project". It then gets reviewed and merged by the "non-believers". This happens repeatedly.
So overall, I think the lack of enthusiasm is largely a skill issue. Not having the skill is fine, but not being willing to learn the skill is the real issue.
I see things changing, as "non-believers" eventually start to realize that they need to evolve or be toast. But it's slower than I imagined.
by crubier
4/13/2026 at 11:11:02 PM
I am a strong believer and selected as power user because of AI usage metrics, but I also see perverse incentives -- a colleague was desperately searching for me on the Claude token usage leaderboard (I was part of a different group he did not have access to) -- it was clear he was actively trying to climb that leaderboard.Meanehile our average PR loc balooned to ~2000loc -- generated with Claude, reviewed with copilot but colleagues also review it with Claude because it gives valid nitpicks that bump up your github stats, while missing glaring functional/architectural issues, overenginerring issues.
No way this doesn't blow up down the road with the massive bloat we're creating while getting high on the "good progress" we're making.
Yes, your 3 minutes prompt got merged. So was my friends(ex-programmer now manager) non-ai generated PR that a technical TL got stuckstuck on for 2 weeks. Different perspective? Survivor bias? High authority?
by raducu
4/14/2026 at 1:32:02 AM
Blame your engineering culture not AI if metrics such as Github stats, number of nitpick reviews and token usage is what is used to judge one's performance.In a sane engineering culture, actual customer-visible impact is what is measured, and AI is just a tool to improve that metric, but to improve it massively.
by crubier
4/13/2026 at 11:15:29 PM
> But then I'm like "hmm actually let me try this real quick" and I prompt Claude for 3 minutes, and 30 minutes later it has one-shotted the whole "two weeks project". It then gets reviewed and merged by the "non-believers". This happens repeatedly.
there are still code-quality issues, prompting issues for long-running tasks, some things are just faster and more deterministic with normal code generators or just find-and-replace etc
people are annoyed at the force-feeding of llms/ai into everything even when its not needed
somethings can be one-shotted and some things cant, and that is fine and perfectly normal but execs don't like that because its not the new hotness
by andrekandre
4/14/2026 at 1:28:37 AM
> somethings can be one-shotted and some things cantTrue but my point is that people vastly underestimate what is one-shottable.
In my experience, 80% of the times an average "non-believer" SW engineer with 7 years experience says something is not one-shottable, I, with my 15 years of experience, think it is fact one-shottable. And 20% of the time, I do verify that by one-shotting it on my free time.
by crubier
4/13/2026 at 11:31:04 PM
I believe that this has happened in some cases but am very skeptical that it is widespread and generalizeable at this point. My own experience is that software engineers thinking they can easily solve a problem in a domain they know nothing about overrate their ability to do so ~99% of the time.by rurp
4/14/2026 at 1:25:24 AM
I'm not talking about coding in domains I know nothing about. I'm talking about coding in domains I've worked in for 15 yearsby crubier
4/13/2026 at 11:07:34 PM
Unsure of this really tracks tho. How are you evaluating for the bias that they’re not merging it because you’re “their leader of 1000 people org” and not because you’re actually an engineer deep in the trenches that knows the second or third order effects of slop?This is a genuine question btw, I see plenty of instances of this in my own org.
by shiveenp
4/14/2026 at 1:24:41 AM
I see your point, but1. I am also on the receiving end of this. My boss often codes and vibecodes, and no one feels like they have to merge their stuff. We only merge it if it meets the high quality standard we have. And there is no drama for blocking a PR in our culture. 2. I am fairly deep in the trenches myself and I know when my PRs are high quality and when they are not. And that does not correlate with use of AI in my experience.
by crubier
4/13/2026 at 11:37:01 PM
Well "non-believers" don't see any gain from being faster, right? That'll just set expectations of "do a lot more for same". Fear of being "toast" will get you the loyalty you'd expect from fear.by gedy
4/14/2026 at 1:21:33 AM
Are you European by any chance? I left Europe to avoid your mentalityby crubier
4/13/2026 at 11:22:01 PM
the best way I found to deal with non-believers is to have claude run code reviews on their own work. I’ll point it to an older commit and get like 3-page markdown file :) works really, really well.on one-shotting 3 minute prompt in 30 minutes though, software is a living organism and early gains can (and often result) in later pains. I do not use this type of argument as it relates to AI as the follow-up as the organism spreads its wings to production seldom makes its way to HN (if this 30 minute one-shot results in a huge security breach I doubt you would be back here with a follow-up, you will quietly handle it…)
by bdangubic
4/13/2026 at 11:48:49 PM
You can get it to generate a 3-page markdown file for any random code, or its own code it just generated. If requested it will produce a seemingly plausible looking review with recommendations and possible issues.How impressed someone get from that will depend on the recipient.
by belorn
4/14/2026 at 12:43:57 PM
output, not recipient. try it on your own code. not everything on the example 3-page markdown you'll agree (much like you push back on the PR) but in significant number of occasions code changes were made based on the provided outputby bdangubic
4/13/2026 at 11:37:27 PM
I've been on this ride about three or four times over decades. Every new major wave of technology takes a surprisingly long time to be adopted, despite advantages that seem obvious to the evangelists.I had the exact same experience with, for example, rolling out fully virtualized infrastructure (VMware ESXi) when that was a new concept.
The resistance was just incredible!
"That's not secure!" was the most common push-back, despite all evidence being that VM-level isolation combined with VLANs was much better isolation than huge consolidated servers running dozens of apps.
"It's slower!" was another common complaint, pointing at the 20% overheads that were the norm at the time (before CPU hardware offload features such as nested page tables). Sure, sure, in benchmarks, but in practice putting a small VM on a big host meant that it inherited the fast network and fibre adapters and hence could burst far above the performance you'd get from a low end "pizza box" with a pair of mechanical drives in a RAID10.
I see the same kind of naive, uninformed push-back against AI. And that's from people that are at least aware of it. I regularly talk to developers that have never even heard of tools like Codex, Gemini CLI, or whatever! This just hasn't percolated through the wider industry to the level that it has in Silicon Valley.
Speaking of security, the scenarios are oddly similar. Sure, prompt injection is a thing, but modern LLMs are vastly "more secure" in a certain sense than traditional solutions.
Consider Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policy engines. Most use nothing more than simple regular expression patterns looking for things like credit card numbers, social security numbers, etc... Similarly, there are policy engines that look for swearwords, internal project code names being sent to third-parties, etc...
All of those are trivially bypassed even by accident! Simply screenshot a spreadsheet and attach the PNG. Swear at the customer in a language other than English. Put spaces in between the characters in each s w e a r word. Whatever.
None of those tricks work against a modern AI. Even if you very carefully phrase a hurtful statement while avoiding the banned word list, the AI will know that's hurtful and flag it. Even if you use an obscure language. Even if you embed it into a meme picture. It doesn't matter, it'll flag it!
This is a true step change in capability.
It'll take a while for people to be dragged into the future, kicking and screaming the whole way there.
by jiggawatts
4/14/2026 at 12:54:05 AM
Would you trust an LLM to recognize a credit card number more reliably than a regular expression can?by suttontom
4/14/2026 at 1:29:29 AM
You're not forced to use only an LLM for data loss prevention! You can combine it with regex. You can also feed the output of the regex matches to the LLM as extra "context".Similarly, I was just flipping through the SQL Server 2025 docs on vector indexes. One of their demos was a "hybrid" search that combined exact text match with semantic vector embedding proximity match.
by jiggawatts
4/13/2026 at 10:46:54 PM
That's likely because it takes an entirely different approach to make it work. Augmenting your existing flow with "sophisticated auto complete" isn't as interesting and isn't actually using the tools how they were designed to be used.I'm not going to pass judgement either way; we'll see how it all shakes out.
I just know for me, personally, I love computers and making them do what I want and in the AI era I am somehow using them even more and doing even more.
by nickstinemates
4/13/2026 at 9:58:53 PM
What about karpathy though?by baxtr
4/13/2026 at 10:48:32 PM
Smart guy phoning it in now - realized a few weeks ago that he “notices” something interesting to share, but is really paraphrasing a recently released paper that found it - without giving paper credit.by rooftopzen
4/14/2026 at 2:08:36 AM
Wasn't Karpathy the guy who used to work for tesla and that tried to convince everyone that you only need cameras for self-driving and that by 2025 there wouldn't be anymore cars without self-driving capabilities to sell?by elzbardico
4/13/2026 at 10:08:52 PM
What's that?by psychoslave
4/13/2026 at 10:46:15 PM
Villain from ghost busters 2by hackable_sand
4/13/2026 at 10:22:21 PM
I feel like this will change as people move around. It’s definitely a skill.by peyton
4/13/2026 at 9:47:18 PM
Underwhelmed is the absolute correct word to use here.Absolutely everyone raves about this but other than a few basic computer related tasks I’ve not seen compelling use cases that justify the billions being lit on fire trying to pursue it.
My cynical take is the crypto bro’s needed something to do with their useless GPU’s after the crash and found the perfect answer in LLM’s.
by grebc
4/13/2026 at 9:57:36 PM
[flagged]by Wissenschafter
4/13/2026 at 10:09:20 PM
It’s primarily about confidence and motivations. People with high confidence at what they do are supremely unmotivated to use something like AI to solve problems they don’t have.People with low confidence will be super excited for AI because it solves problems they weren’t even thinking about.
Executives that don’t write code are super excited about AI because hopefully it means they can continue to high low confidence people, which are plentiful and cost less.
I am sitting on the sidelines watching in disbelief. I don’t use AI and don’t plan to. I used to write JavaScript for a living and still get JavaScript job alerts from a lot of job boards. The compensation for JavaScript work is starting to shoot through the roof as employers are moving away from garbage like React and Angular. The recent jobs are becoming fewer and are more reliant upon people with tons of experience that can actually program. Clearly AI is not replacing positions for higher talent with greater than 8-12 years experience.
by austin-cheney
4/14/2026 at 5:06:33 AM
"I refuse to pick up the magic hammer that nails things in by me just thinking about it while holding it in my hand; nosiree, give me that old fashioned hammer so I can sit here and nail some nails into a 2x4 while the guy using the other tool is building whole slop neighborhoods. Ha, that guy is so dumb and I'm too cool because I won't ever use that hammer."I don't get it. Proudly saying you don't plan to use better tools is not some 'cool' look or the brag you think it is. You're just making yourself less valuable and being ignorant on purpose.
Cool.
by Wissenschafter
4/14/2026 at 7:07:29 AM
Yes. You don’t get it. I am not seeking your affirmation. There is no vanity in this for me. I am not bragging to you or anyone else.by austin-cheney
4/13/2026 at 10:02:33 PM
Blindly dismissing everyone not impressed by the AI hype only serves to further delegitimize the AI hype.by pesus
4/13/2026 at 11:00:27 PM
This website is literally unrecognizable from 10 years ago. I don't even know where to go now. /r/accelerate seems to be the only place with people who aren't blinded by some kind of emotional bias, plain stubbornness, or straight up stupidity.by Wissenschafter
4/14/2026 at 1:49:04 AM
You've been complaining about Hacker News for years.by vor_
4/14/2026 at 2:21:03 AM
Totally right! The folks who were very recently telling us we were all going to be trading NFTs in the metaverse are the clear eyed optimists not motivated by anything but rational consideration for the truth.by AlexandrB
4/14/2026 at 2:27:21 AM
Finding people on HN that think NFTs are a joke and don't understand their utility, mind blowing.This place is fucking dead.
by Wissenschafter
4/14/2026 at 3:15:00 AM
>This place is fucking dead.The door is right over there, feel free to see yourself out at any time. :)
by jjulius
4/14/2026 at 2:23:46 AM
It seems like you get personally offended by people using their critical reasoning abilities.I know a folk who did a PhD in the area, and work at one of those frontier labs as a researcher, and privately he is as sceptical as the most "stubborn" HN denizen you mention.
Unbounded enthusiasm for AI without any reservations is something that can only be born out of minds utterly deprived of imagination and creativity.
by elzbardico
4/14/2026 at 4:23:53 AM
"It seems like you get personally offended by people not using their critical reasoning abilities."ftfy
by Wissenschafter
4/14/2026 at 1:46:40 AM
When you use the term "luddite" in the way you do, you reveal that you aren't aware of who the Luddites actually were. Luddites weren't anti-technology; many of them were experts at using advanced machinery. What they opposed was the poor quality output of automated factories and the use of machinery to circumvent apprenticeships and decent wages.As for your promise of a great leap at some vague point in the future, that's such a widely-mocked AI industry trope at this point that it's a little embarrassing you went there.
by vor_
4/14/2026 at 2:04:15 AM
The only thing that will be embarrassing is how badly your comments, and those like yours will age.I don't know what happened to this place, but it went from actual young people sharing information on the newest things in tech, tech philosophy, interesting stuff; to now old men yelling at the clouds about the new tech.
by Wissenschafter
4/14/2026 at 3:14:06 AM
>The only thing that will be embarrassing is how badly your comments, and those like yours will ageHubris.
by jjulius
4/14/2026 at 7:12:51 AM
I agree with your basic point, but it’s not just an age thing. There are plenty of older people enthusiastically using AI for software development now. Just as an example, Steve Yegge, who vibe-coded the Beads and Gas Town AI projects, is around 57. I’m a bit older than him, and I’m working with Claude, Gemini, and Codex on a daily basis, having great fun and learning tons.What we seem to be seeing with AI is that the prospect of completely changing the way you work is threatening for a lot of people, and of course so is the prospect of losing your job. When people are faced with something threatening, a common reaction is to criticize it in every possible way - you can’t admit anything about it is good because that risks encouraging the threat. It’s not exactly rational, but it’s what people often do.
HN has never been exempt from that, it’s just that AI is a big change that brings out this instinct in many more people.
by antonvs
4/13/2026 at 10:04:44 PM
As a senior dev who has been using these tools to their fullest effectiveness in production environments, until AI can reduce the entropy of a codebase while still adding capability I will continue to be underwhelmed.by mortalapeman
4/13/2026 at 10:10:24 PM
Did you ever ask it to do that?by woah
4/14/2026 at 5:00:32 AM
Did one ever ask if AI can reduce entropy of a growing code base? You mustn’t have read that famous short story by Asimov.by sph
4/13/2026 at 11:08:54 PM
"They Don't Think It Be Like It Is But It Do", is all I can think.The simple truth is, these senior devs have no idea how to use these new tools to their capabilities.
It's a simple case of PEBCAK; ironic considering most of them would be the ones throwing that term around 20 years ago.
by Wissenschafter
4/14/2026 at 2:32:11 AM
Or more likely you don't have the knowledge and the skills they do. They are judging things in a level that you don't have any idea it exists.by elzbardico
4/14/2026 at 2:36:52 AM
Sure, I hear that all the time here; I used to think that myself. It's all bullshit.You're all a bunch of ignorant old men yelling at literal cloud servers.
I'm done with this place. /g/ and /r/accelerate are the only places left not filled with idiots anymore.
by Wissenschafter
4/14/2026 at 2:47:57 AM
I sometimes wonder if AI overly enthusiastic cheerleaders are all suffering some kind of LLM induced psychosis.by elzbardico
4/14/2026 at 3:01:43 AM
Or more likely you don't have the knowledge and skills they do. They are judging things in a level that you don't have any idea it exists.by Wissenschafter
4/14/2026 at 5:03:32 AM
4chan and accelerationists, what a lovely collection of well-adjusted and rational people. Good bye.by sph
4/13/2026 at 10:27:04 PM
> You won't be 'underwhelmed' long.This has been your constant mantra for 3 years now and is part of the reason people are underwhelmed.
by Herbstluft
4/13/2026 at 10:15:13 PM
Always fun to see the article happen live in the comments section.by jandrese
4/13/2026 at 10:11:37 PM
> You won't be 'underwhelmed' long."Yes, it sucks now, but believe me it won't be for long" spiel has been hyped for several years now.
Oh, don't get me wrong, these tools are amazing. But just yesterday a very small refactoring resulted in 480 fully duplicated lines in a 5000-line codebase (on top of extremely bad DB access patterns) despite all the best shamanic rituals this world has to offer [1].
So yeah, senior engineers especially use these tools daily, and keep being completely honest about their issues and shortcomings. Unlike the hype and scam artists.
[1] Oh, sorry. I meant to say skills, context engineering and management, memory, prompt engineering.
by troupo
4/14/2026 at 2:14:49 AM
" But just yesterday a very small refactoring resulted in 480 fully duplicated lines in a 5000-line codebase (on top of extremely bad DB access patterns) despite all the best shamanic rituals this world has to offer."Get better rituals. PEBCAK.
by Wissenschafter
4/14/2026 at 7:09:39 AM
Yeah yeah. There exists some secret ritual known only to the selected elite that make these tools perfect, no mistakes.(The only people who say that are scammers and peddlers, and the only people who believe that are juniors or don't know how to code at all)
by troupo
4/14/2026 at 12:02:53 AM
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.And even staying within the comfort of AI enthusiasm: Google wasn't exactly leading in this race. If you have this much confidence in what those presenters and engineers at Google told you, you now have some opportunities to make a lot of money.
by 2pEXgD0fZ5cF
4/14/2026 at 2:10:10 AM
https://github.com/gca-americas/way-back-homeAnyone here who is currently 'underwhelmed'; please get through all 5 levels here and then say the same thing.
This is just the beginning. I seriously can't believe this place turned into neo-boomerism ideology on tech. I honestly don't get it, just makes me think everyone here talking about being seniors and architecture and blah blah; don't actually know shit, and aren't actually good at what they do.
by Wissenschafter
4/14/2026 at 3:12:09 AM
Levels 2,3,4,5 all say coming soon.Did you have AI Agent summarise this for you?
by grebc
4/14/2026 at 3:22:14 AM
Funny how it says that, yet I finished the whole thing.Maybe you should try reading a bit more.
https://codelabs.developers.google.com/way-back-home-level-5...
That is the completed instructions for the fifth level, I leave it as an exercise to the reader to actually read more and find the rest of the steps on their own.
I spent some time chatting with Google engineer who put this together, Ayo Adedeji, at UCLA's SAIRS conference.
by Wissenschafter
4/14/2026 at 3:27:54 AM
Cool story brother.by grebc
4/14/2026 at 4:02:52 AM
It is; thanks.You asked about Google and what impressed me so much, going through this exercise, while not exactly helpful for me and my work directly (I'm doing similar things but completely in the Azure ecosystem), it is definitely a great display of how agents are more than just an 'LLM' that everyone here seems to think is equivalent to AI.
It's seriously the opposite feeling of imposter syndrome at this point, I'm in my 30's, a senior data engineer myself at a F200 company; I can't believe so many of my peers are so behind and ignorant of what is going on, confident enough to makes publicly lasting comments about how 'unreliable', 'bad', 'slop'; 'AI will never this or that'.
It's incredible what is going on.
by Wissenschafter
4/14/2026 at 5:48:33 AM
I didn’t ask any of that.I’m not sure why you’re still here, you’re just fueling your own unhealthy grievance at this point.
by grebc
4/14/2026 at 2:45:44 AM
Even SOTA models when used in agents in simple NLP tasks such as text classification still fail more times than acceptable when evaluated against a realistic evaluation dataset with sufficient example variety and with some adversarial prompts included.Improving such uses cases is mostly an artisanal endeavor, sometimes a few-shot prompt improves things, sometimes it improves things at the expense of kind of overfitting it, sometimes structured reasoning works, sometimes it doesn't, or sometimes it works and then the latency and token explodes, etc etc....
And yet a lot of teams don't see this problem because they don't care much about evaluations, and will only find this issues in production a few months after deployment.
Are those who care about evaluation luddites?
by elzbardico
4/13/2026 at 10:07:10 PM
The same could have been said to someone who had yet to encounter generative AI. "Wait until you try it, you won't be underwhelmed for long".But here we are.
Over time and usage the limitations of a thing become apparent.
by abcde666777
4/13/2026 at 11:04:38 PM
It’s always been this way. It’s an online community.by grebc
4/13/2026 at 10:14:48 PM
Is it just me or is there a growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone…by ua709
4/13/2026 at 10:29:44 PM
There are no "AI-insiders"."AI-insiders" are trying to market their tools to you. See Anthropic's continuous lithany of "all programmers will be replaced in 6 months" while they struggle to make their TUI API wrapper consume less than 2-4 GB of RAM (they brought it down from 68 GB[1]), or have a decent uptime.
[1] Yes, you read it right. They had to buy a team of actual engineers to do the job: https://x.com/jarredsumner/status/2026497606575398987
by troupo
4/13/2026 at 10:36:12 PM
> When did Hacker news start becoming a luddite, bad takes everywhere I look, feels like everyone is '50 year old burnt out guy' that has no idea what is going on vibe?Much to the opposite, I think healthy skepticism is a sign of maturity. The overeager embracing of hype cycles is extremely cringe.
> I just got back from a SAIRS conference at UCLA and talked directly with some of the presenters and engineers at Google.
Cringe, as I was saying.
Conferences are just mutual fart smelling, swagger, and expensing trips on company momey. I am not against it, but treating your participation in some conference as a sign of the future is very silly.
Every conference I participated always overhyped every current bullshit.
by surgical_fire
4/13/2026 at 10:07:05 PM
tl;dr - "I will dismiss this because of the time I've been spending in a pro-AI bubble".by jjulius
4/14/2026 at 2:18:23 AM
I never needed to be in a pro-AI bubble to dismiss bullshit; I wrote my capstone Philosophy paper on AI and Existentialism back in 2014.I am dismissing the neo-luddites because they are stupid and wrong, not because I am in a pro-AI bubble.
by Wissenschafter
4/14/2026 at 3:11:03 AM
There is emotional bias and stubbornness in nearly all of your responses in this thread, the very same traits you lambasted HN broadly for in another comment. Rather than calling people, "stupid and wrong", why don't you make your case?If you don't want to be bothered to argue your points, and this place truly chaps your ass to the degree it does, why even waste your time commenting at all when, according to you, there's a more fun place with bigger brains that-a-way, as far as you're concerned? points
I mean, it takes more energy and effort to be angry and annoyed than to just move on and leave us luddites in the dust.
by jjulius
4/14/2026 at 3:32:33 AM
It is pretty emotional seeing a place with people you respected and learned from for so long, where you could rely on for the place to find the newest and most interesting things happening in tech, where people in the know discussed the technical aspects; to now neo-luddites everywhere bashing shit they don't understand, ON A FUCKING TECH FORUM; like THE tech forum.I feel like I'm living in some kind of bizzarro world now when I read anything AI related on HN. It's insane.
by Wissenschafter
4/14/2026 at 12:55:04 PM
Yes, we know, you've said that a few times already.You could foster that high-level dialogue you seem to value so much by trying to better articulate your view so that the plebs understand, kinda like I suggested just there. Ya know, "be the change you want to see in the world" and all that, but okay...
by jjulius
4/14/2026 at 7:15:22 AM
> bashing shit they don't understand, ON A FUCKING TECH FORUM; like THE tech forum.Or: they actually understand the tech, and see its limitations. Unlike wide-eyed neophytes and zealots.
Tech forum doesn't mean "uncritically accept and love any and all technology".
Oh, and they don't find the need to sling insults like monkey sling feces just because someone doesn't agree with them.
by troupo
4/13/2026 at 10:10:56 PM
This place actually hates all technology after the invention of Lisp. And there's the common online incentive to dunk on things that also exists here. Hence the infamous Dropbox comment and others.But it's also been anti-Javascript, anti-cloud, anti-social-media, anti-crypto, anti-React, and so on.
I would therefore not in a million years expect it to be pro-LLM, and this is so obvious to me that I'm a bit suspicious of your motives for acting confused about it, as if it was ever any different.
by 0x3f
4/14/2026 at 1:54:11 AM
> But it's also been anti-Javascript, anti-cloud, anti-social-media, anti-crypto, anti-React, and so on.It was never any of these things, and you're misremembering if you think it was. There's never been a mono-opinion held by some all-encompassing hivemind.
by vor_
4/14/2026 at 7:06:30 AM
I'm not misremembering. You can easily find monoculturey threads about all of these things. Just because there's a small slice of counter views, doesn't mean the average HN positions on these things isn't or wasn't decidedly negative.by 0x3f
4/13/2026 at 11:03:11 PM
It's literally unbearable now. I don't know how the place that once used to be exciting and deep in the know; is now old-man-yells-at-clouds ignorant of what is happening. It's actually really sad. /g/ and /r/accelerate seem like the last bastions of actual intelligent people discussing these things.by Wissenschafter
4/14/2026 at 1:56:44 AM
[dead]by vor_
4/13/2026 at 10:52:13 PM
It's the same as the sad drunk man talking bad about the King at a dirty bar. It makes them feel better to compare or say they're better in some way.by scottyah
4/13/2026 at 10:44:21 PM
Shocking that people who are in data science/ML are excited about data science/ML, and people in jobs not interested in that area are not interested in it.It's like a programmer being surprised that a worker in $random_job wants to keep doing their job, and not learn how to be a programmer instead.
by rconti
4/13/2026 at 10:08:46 PM
There's this weird unspoken assumption in a lot of these HN posts that any layoffs or lack of hiring is due to companies shirking on providing the cushy jobs they owe software engineers. Actually, they hire engineers to get stuff done. If it's true that AI is just a big 'ol scam and it doesn't even work, then I guess we'll see the companies that insist on nothing but the finest artisanily hand-typed organic code rocket to the top of the charts on app downloads, sales, revenue, and market cap.by woah
4/13/2026 at 10:13:03 PM
This is basically how most engineers talk to their managers, politely implying - "can you see how this decision has a short term payoff but a long term consequence?"Before LLMs I only worked at one place that "only hired seniors and above" and now its the most commonplace thing in the world.
Nobody owes me anything, I already have the skills I need, where will the juniors come from that these companies are going to need in a few years? We don't need extremist stances in either camp, we need balance.
by hilariously
4/13/2026 at 10:22:06 PM
> Nobody owes me anything, I already have the skills I need, where will the juniors come from that these companies are going to need in a few years? We don't need extremist stances in either camp, we need balance.Seems a bit like asking where the bread will come from, if no-one is forced to bake it.
by 0x3f
4/13/2026 at 10:55:06 PM
More like where the bread will come from if nobody learns how to bake it and the knowledge of how to bake it is lost.by sumeno
4/14/2026 at 6:59:54 AM
Yes, this is what hysteria about bread looks like. People have been saying a disaster of the kids not knowing how to bake is coming since the 1800's. Yet, we still have bread.How exactly will the knowledge of creating software be lost when the claim is that an ubiquitous software creation tool is going to take over the world? Is it going to refuse to emit anything less complex than a todo app?
I've never baked bread in my life and yet, with the right motivation, I'm sure I could learn from the literature and some trial and error alone. In the hypothetical world where bread demand massively exceeds supply, we'd form a guild and incrementally improve from there. Same way we learned it in the first place. Breadmaking wasn't gifted to us by aliens.
by 0x3f
4/13/2026 at 11:06:24 PM
> if no-one is forced to bake it.
by andrekandre
4/14/2026 at 6:47:27 AM
Well, that is the point :) we don't fret about where the bread comes from too much, or talk about how we need to act now lest we never have bread again. People want bread, and the price goes up until someone is willing to make bread.by 0x3f
4/13/2026 at 10:12:34 PM
I imagine the reality lies somewhere in between the two extreme takes that you present here.by galvatron9k
4/13/2026 at 10:18:18 PM
> If it's true that AI is just a big 'ol scam and it doesn't even work, then I guess we'll see the companies that insist on nothing but the finest artisanily hand-typed organic code rocket to the top of the charts on app downloads, sales, revenue, and market cap.AI works fine to get a vibe coded BS version of the app. No doubt there. But eventually, especially once scale hits your app, it will devolve into an unholy mess of low performance and (extremely) high cost if you do not have a bunch of senior talent able and willing to clean up after the AI mess.
Unfortunately, our capitalist economy only rewards the metrics you mentioned... but by the time the house of cards collapses, either from financial issues stemming from the above or because the tech debt explodes, it's too late to turn the ship around.
by mschuster91
4/13/2026 at 11:02:22 PM
And I've even heard rumors of software engineers that don't even write apps or write code that runs on the internet at all. They say some of them don't even use javascript or python! The horror.by ua709