Punch yourself in the face with reality

7/14/2026 at 2:15:20 PM

I spent multiple 5-hour sessions spec-ing my climbing app with AI, clarifying interactions, algorithm, workflow etc. It ended up a frankenstein that I didn't recognise or know how each part interact with each other. Command line were a mess, different commands doing the same thing, with similar but redundant arguments. Everything looks kind of doing what I intended but overly convoluted and nothing really works. Real progress was made when I actually dig into the documentation of colmap/OpenMVS (essential tools, which I had never used before, in my workflow).

The AI gave me unprecedented turn around time in experimentation. The same experiments would easily take me over a month in the past. Now it was a few days. But still, real progress is made only when my understanding catch up with reality.

by a_c

7/14/2026 at 3:33:45 PM

It's very difficult to keep AI focused, when it barfs out 3 pages of reply in response to a one-sentence prompt. It's sort of its nature for some reason, it's very impressive if you've never seen it but it's exhausting to use for very long. It's like a very eager assistant who doesn't have enough experience to understand scope.

by SoftTalker

7/14/2026 at 3:48:45 PM

3 pages of reply or overly verbose code, often without abstractions - I read all the posters here and in other forums say that programming has shifted towards reviewing AI output rather than coding said output manually; I agree, however, I just don't buy that everyone is actually reviewing the code as intensely as one would expect - there is a tendency that arrived rather quickly to assume that the AI is correct and efficient. I guess the ultimate reviewer is another AI agent I guess.

by bigmattystyles

7/14/2026 at 9:17:44 PM

I think ultimately you still have to pay down tech debt eventually. Either through bankruptcy (throwaway the project) or servicing the debt (refactoring, rearchitecting etc).

It's not different than when coding by hand, often we take shortcuts by hand that we then have to pay for later. It really just becomes a judgement call on when to stop prompting new features and start service what you have.

I think with AI and vibecoding its tempting to assume the output is good and chase the dopamine hits of more features, more features, more features, but eventually you get stuck.

That being said AI is also a great tool at paying down tech debt. It's great at helping you read a codebase and can be great at making the mechanical changes you want. And I think there is some truth to the story that newer models will be able to pay down debt (fix the slop) of older models. But its all shades of grey, newer models are better than older ones, but can I emit slop with 5.6 faster than 5.7 will be able to fix it in the future? Nobody knows.

It's not like human projects are devoid of bad code, its all tradeoffs and shades of gray. But to be honest I haven't written a line of code by hand in a while.

by admax88qqq

7/14/2026 at 3:39:06 PM

I find it highly similar between running agents and running human teams.

Clear goal, share context, delegate but verify. Running a team of engineers also inevitably generates pages and pages of material, design spec, code, test, review. Just that we now do that with agents and agents are way less trust worthy

by a_c

7/15/2026 at 7:49:03 AM

What's good for agents is good for humans. That's about it.

The only difference is that agents don't deal well with ambiguity in processes. If your build process is 15 steps, a human will just endure because "that's how it's always been" - an agent will keep stumbling until you either optimise the process or document it.

And now it's better for humans too, they either got a simplified process or better documentation.

by theshrike79

7/14/2026 at 9:40:29 PM

> for some reason

Usage is metered/billed by the token. This suggests a few possible hypotheses for why they might tend to be verbose.

by recursive

7/14/2026 at 4:14:23 PM

>It's sort of its nature for some reason

I've known some people who can never stop talking. Maybe they are overly represented in the training set.

by bryanrasmussen

7/14/2026 at 8:29:38 PM

The verbosity in code is also a huge problem. I asked it to introduce 4 functions in my project (like, literally, just functions) and I'm looking at 32 files changed and two spec files that are total 200 lines long. It's functional, but jesus, this is going to need a refactor.

by overgard

7/14/2026 at 2:47:44 PM

It sounds great for prototyping. Once you do a month's experimentation in a day and generate some shit app that barely works, but looks functional, you have a definite goal to recreate that design but working properly.

by inigyou

7/14/2026 at 3:11:59 PM

It seems like an absolute dream for corporate execs who don't know anything about development, see a taped-together prototype built in a day, and think to themselves "Wow, we're 90% done... we could almost ship that!!"

by ryandrake

7/14/2026 at 4:23:45 PM

Well, from my experience, if the AI dev is ill intended, he can just say nothing then the exec will go "we can ship now as it is!"

by vitorfblima

7/14/2026 at 8:12:28 PM

nobody throws a prototype so this will happen

by uwagar

7/14/2026 at 3:06:38 PM

This was true a while ago. Today we are replacing decades old sloppy production code with 100% verified better code through tests written by AI, code written by AI. This is not looking functional but drop in functional replacement with measurable improvements.

by pizzafeelsright

7/14/2026 at 4:38:29 PM

there are two camps: those who have spent the tokens to figure out how to wield AI, and those who haven't. unfortunately, it's not cheap to get to the former category… and i imagine it'd be difficult to lose access to that tooling and fall back to the second category.

by dfee

7/14/2026 at 9:19:21 PM

Experimenting can be pricey but early on I spent my own money thinking "if I can get a handle on how to do this I'll get a 100x return on my money" and it was a good bet.

If you're not convinced - sign up and pay by the token of a high or highest level model. Anthropic or Grok for example. The vendor isn't the concern. The quality of what can be done. Then, find an agentic 'harness' that is written in a language you can read. There are several (pi, opencode, crush, etc) and then clone that repo or one of yours you don't mind having exposed and then point your agent to that repo.

Now ask questions: what api calls are made by this repo? Where are secrets stored and sourced from? Do an adversarial investigation and list the bugs. Then fix the bugs.

Then review the work and determine the value and how to wield this new tool. It replaces reading, writing, and editing - not thinking.

by pizzafeelsright

7/14/2026 at 11:15:26 PM

> It replaces reading, writing, and editing - not thinking.

If that wasn't a hyphen I'd be sure this line was AI-written.

by inigyou

7/14/2026 at 11:42:11 PM

You were right to call out the possibility. I assure you, honest take: this is all written myself.

I cannot stand the style of Opus 4.7 and 4.8.

by pizzafeelsright

7/14/2026 at 4:59:00 PM

You have coworkers who know what a test is? Hire me! ;)

by ReactiveJelly

7/14/2026 at 3:03:21 PM

Indeed it is. I’m very grateful to what LLM enables me.

The revelation to me was that I used to code what I know, now I could code what I don’t know. The common path is that when I face something I don’t know, which is quite often, to move forward I have to level up my understanding.

by a_c

7/14/2026 at 6:28:14 PM

I find the more structure that the AI can be given to follow the better. I recently tried building a side project with Elixir, Phoenix & LiveView but on the recommendation of somebody I decided to have it use the Ash framework within it.

I've been very pleasantly surprised. The combination of the compiler improvements in Elixir 1.20 and the structural guardrails from Ash seems to have led to very consistent, organized and readable code.

by brightball

7/15/2026 at 12:36:57 AM

As apps get larger and more complex, I get the LLM to produce 'developer documentation'. I find it helps them stay on the rails, and it helps ME stay on top of everything.

The 'spec' frameworks are documentation as well, but can become contradictory as decisions about the app change over time.

by rukuu001

7/14/2026 at 6:09:53 PM

I think the mistake there was the 5 hour session specing the app. It's so hard to know what you want before you see it, so optimize towards seeing it as soon as possible. That's what I thought the article was going to be about based off the title.

Once you have something concrete you can iterate on the prototype until it's a mess. But, hopefully, in that time you got closer to figuring out what you want. And even if the code for the prototype is a mess the "idea" of it should be cleaner. I like to have an LLM make a new spec at that point, and start fresh with it. You can clean up the abstractions and the UX there.

When writing code is cheap figuring out what you want to write is the hard part. It always was, but the barrier of getting the code written and working made that less obvious.

by sbloz

7/14/2026 at 7:38:50 PM

One of the most foundational insights I’ve ever had in IT is clients don’t know what they want until you shove it in their face. And only then do they say no, no, no, change this, this and that.

Same story as building a house. There’s so many unknowns.

by grebc

7/14/2026 at 8:11:41 PM

it's cunningham's law where the fast LLM generated iteration is the confidently wrong answer that the clients will correct

by geophph

7/15/2026 at 3:15:17 PM

The only two instances where I didn't manage to achieve satisfactory outcome with AI were when I overspecced ahead of time. The things I left out of the spec were implemented in the most undesired manner possible.

The best mode of work for me was gradually sculpting the prototype into a product by providing feedback and moving to version 2 (from scratch but often with v1 accessible as inspiration) if I felt like it's becoming overbloated.

by scotty79

7/14/2026 at 8:51:09 PM

A climbing app..

Does anyone want one?

The article says to stop building and go outside!

And actually, talking about climbing apps with fellow climbers is a great way to be outside.

by cadamsdotcom

7/14/2026 at 9:24:22 PM

I climb and I want one :)

> talking about climbing apps with fellow climbers is a great way to be outside.

Indeed. The climbers I met are very supportive. They helped me scan the gym, shared their own climbing footage, which is what I'm trying to do, visualize climbing in a 3D scene.

by a_c

7/14/2026 at 1:36:26 PM

> And I think that’s the biggest danger of AI. You convince yourself that you are doing something useful when you are not.

Building technology to overcome relatable hardships and frictions is a worthy challenge full of meaning.

Using someone else's technology to erase frictions and hardships from your life can erode meaning.

On my worst days I am convinced programming and technological optimism is a theft of meaning; personal satisfaction at solving a human problem awkwardly mapped to technology, at the expense of users dating, socializing, or consuming with discomfort and therefore the possibility of growth and meaning.

by randusername

7/14/2026 at 1:55:34 PM

I agree with your overall sentiment, although maybe the article and this sentiment more generally are going a little bit overboard with the skepticism/negativity.

It is a little alarming the way people treat AI as another human relationship, yes.

But AI is also a pretty useful research partner and rubber duck for ideas so long as you know going into it that it’s going to have a bias toward agreeing with you.

This situation reminds me of Calvin and Hobbes comics that mock the idea of Calvin’s dad’s idea of building character.

For example, I was debating ECC memory and cheap used business workstation hardware for a homelab recently with an AI. It helped me pick a system out of some eBay listings and verified whether the model and Xeon processor SKU supported ECC.

When I went to buy the RAM, it actually caught a mistake where I thought a listing was for UDIMM when it was actually RDIMM.

It’s not going to build my character or build my growth and meaning to buy the wrong thing from an online store.

by Grombobulous

7/14/2026 at 2:25:54 PM

> It’s not going to build my character or build my growth and meaning to buy the wrong thing from an online store.

dealing with the consequences of my mistakes sounds like growth to me

by NopIdoN

7/14/2026 at 3:35:11 PM

And when a mistake is deadly? Should we remove all safety systems so we can deal with the consequences?

The number of mistakes you can make is infinite in comparison to the number of correct choices you can make. Since you don't have infinite lives and time there must be some manner of problem space reduction to ensure you get anything done.

Luckily for us humans evolution has spend quadrillions of hours doing just that for us. Modern technology has made it so you don't spend your entire life trying to get something to eat every waking moment of the day. This leads to some problems of your ideology of hardships lead to growth. Which hardships? Which growth? Should you go back to living in a cave like a mammal to get the full experience?

by pixl97

7/14/2026 at 5:02:04 PM

This is a good time to point out that slippery slope is a fallacy.

Saying, "Experiencing some friction is good for building character" is not equivalent to saying "We should demolish all technology and force babies to survive on their own in the woods."

That the extreme position is wrong does not strictly imply that the moderate position is too.

by munificent

7/14/2026 at 6:44:05 PM

There being a more extreme position that is wrong, doesn't mean that a supposedly moderate position isn't extreme. See: Overton window.

This is the particular problem with deciding a position, it's all shades of grey.

200 years ago a good number of humans thought that owning other humans was a-ok. Today that's mostly not true. In 200 years it's likely the vast majority of humanity will look at eating meat and owning pets at the same level of horror. Which is the extreme position? Which is the moderate?

by pixl97

7/14/2026 at 9:32:02 PM

[dead]

by munificent

7/14/2026 at 4:54:01 PM

> evolution has spend quadrillions of hours doing just that

Magnitude pedantery incoming: 1 billion years is "only" about 10 trillion hours.

by saulpw

7/14/2026 at 6:32:20 PM

Thank goodness it was only one bacteria doing all that evolving!

Think of combined manpower. If you have 2 people working an 8 hour shift you've spent 16 hours.

/Pedantry crisis averted.

by pixl97

7/14/2026 at 6:58:57 PM

Oh good, that does make me rest easier. Though technically the units should be man-hours (or bacterium-hours?). Now this makes me wonder how many life-hours there have been...looks like ^40 'beings' over all time[0], and ^43 being-hours total.

Fun math!

[0]Crockford et al. (2023) estimate about 10^30 cells exist today, and between 10^39 and 10^40 cells have ever existed on Earth.

by saulpw

7/14/2026 at 8:16:35 PM

Yeah, but it would be more-or-less in parallel, spread over however many organisms

by webnrrd2k

7/14/2026 at 4:16:21 PM

yep

by NopIdoN

7/14/2026 at 2:44:49 PM

Mistakes without a significant lesson or takeaway aren’t a useful avenue for growth.

I think it’s possible that this concept that AI is an easy shortcut is a form of gatekeeping.

We had the same reactions to StackOverflow and web search when those technologies came around. And there’s certainly partial truth to it. Maybe reading a full book really does make you more well-rounded than googling your answer, but sometimes blowing a lot of time searching an index in a physical book hoping to find the piece of knowledge you need is just spending time for sake of spending time.

by Grombobulous

7/14/2026 at 3:55:47 PM

The more attention you give a thing, the more it changes you. Significance is up to you.

Maybe you never learn to check your own details. Maybe that's ok.

by NopIdoN

7/14/2026 at 8:00:26 PM

Yes but what would they learn from their mistake?

"I should run my purchase decisions past an AI in the future."

by SamPatt

7/15/2026 at 12:42:01 AM

Yes, but it's dumb to deliberately provoke a mistake that could be avoided, just to "build character"

by xg15

7/14/2026 at 8:50:41 PM

[flagged]

by jamie_royce

7/14/2026 at 11:53:11 AM

This quote from Philip K Dick seems relevant:

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

by sorokod

7/14/2026 at 1:22:10 PM

It’s a nice quote. But what about the notion that we’re always believing in something, and sometimes those beliefs tune closer to something objective but if we keep tuning past that into something else, then that reality becomes hard to conceive of and really does seem like it’s gone away.

by totetsu

7/14/2026 at 1:36:31 PM

No matter how much you don't believe there is a tiger behind the bush. The tiger really believes you are going to be tasty.

by throwawayffffas

7/14/2026 at 3:47:24 PM

So you build a machine that kills all tigers and now you don't have to worry about belief.

The problem with objective reality is 1. it changes. 2. it can be different for different people in different places.

If I live in rural India, there is probably not a tiger behind the bush. If I live in downtown Chicago there is almost certainly not a tiger behind the bush. This leads to the hard problem of probabilistic thinking which requires a lot more energy than black and white thinking.

Lastly, humans are real, and even incorrect belief systems create a reality you have to live in. God, for example, is almost certainly not real. Saying that in a forum will have some percentage of people downvote you and try to reply with a relatively poor argument. Saying it in the wrong place and time outside of the internet can most certainly get you killed. So just because something isn't real doesn't mean you should open your mouth at an inopportune time and learn the reality it created.

by pixl97

7/14/2026 at 7:18:12 PM

Conscious probabilistic thinking is perhaps more demanding of energy. But all animals engage in subconscious probabilistic thinking. That gut feeling you have for example is your inner bayesian logic refined from millions of years of natural selection. The child being afraid of the dark is demonstrating deeply ingrained probabilistic thinking and assessing survival risk in real time. The higher order abstractions modern language and modern structured society saddles upon us often get in the way of how our mind actually works, as they are far younger than the mind. Poke a bug with a stick: it runs away. Poke a lizard with a stick: it runs away. Poke a human with a stick: it runs away. This example is an ancient survival mechanism all shared by the common ancestor of the human, the lizard, and the bug, which is probably half a billion years old or more. And we won't necessarily get any better with the demands of modern language and society either, as these are under far weaker selection pressures (if any) than these other highly conserved behaviors.

by asdff

7/14/2026 at 6:21:52 PM

This leads to the hard problem of probabilistic thinking which requires a lot more energy than black and white thinking.

You are overthinking this. Reality exists in a point in time and space, same point where you are. That is the only problem you face.

by sorokod

7/14/2026 at 1:31:27 PM

When you break a leg you can’t start believing it is all good. It doesn’t go away.

As much as you would have aspirations to be a pro soccer player, badly enough broken leg can prevent you from ever being good enough.

Your imagination of being pro player does go away when in reality you’re not fit for the purpose.

by ozim

7/14/2026 at 1:48:22 PM

You can't become a pro footballer just by wishing your leg wasn't broken, but you can pay close attention to the difference between pain and suffering, and acknowledge the pain without accepting any unnecessary suffering.

Pain is part of reality. Suffering comes from wishing reality was different to how it is.

by jstanley

7/14/2026 at 11:38:24 PM

There will always be a point where you simply snap under stress, no matter how well you rationally understand the difference between pain and suffering while being at rest, and you will undeniably suffer from the pain when that happens. It's why torture works so well.

Not to say that knowing this difference has no merit, just saying that it has limits to how much it can do. After all, reality can also hit the brain, when it gets flooded by hormones and neurotransmitters that take away your rational thinking.

by Archer6621

7/15/2026 at 8:28:55 AM

Agreed

by jstanley

7/15/2026 at 12:31:51 AM

Maybe that's the kind of reality that the posted article is about, but I would say that, soccer is already just a made up game that has no inherent claim to reality, and pro-soccer doubly so.

by totetsu

7/15/2026 at 8:21:39 AM

Common philosophical answer is that people only can know the approximation of reality, never the reality itself.

Better approximations usually score you more points, which is why our perception usually evolves closer to reality.

Bad scoring systems exist.

For example, let's say if an extremely privileged person – a favorite son|daughter of a billionaire – takes random chances and people around him|her always agree and accommodate for them to win (because they want a favor from a parent), than this person will most likely have a very warped sense of reality through no fault of their own. Basically their only approximation could only be "Do whatever, just don't touch fire with bare hands and don't make daddy angry"

On the other hand, the suffering child from "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" would also have warped sense of reality, because they lose no matter what action they take. The only reality approximation they can know is "everything feels bad"

Sidenote: in my philosophy, the continuous warping of reality happens mostly to people in overprivileged and underprivileged positions. Which is why I believe that a good equality index makes for a healthier society. But thats my pov, I'm not trying to sell it or anything :)

Note that I wrote "continuous warping". While sometimes bad approximations got rewarded more than good ones, reality is probabilistic. Since it can't be comprehended by people, we basically define reality as "something that is more likely".

And that's the answer to your question. If you tune past the reality, you start scoring worse again, and turn back. It's a distance thing, and the goal is to get as close to zero as you can, doesn't matter from which direction.

by lesostep

7/14/2026 at 1:33:22 PM

There isn't an exact quote from Douglas Adams, you have to read it all, but he put the point marvelously: reality is scary, unlimited and lovecraftesque, and we have filters to avoid that. Only when you master those filters you can consider yourself conscious.

by lstodd

7/15/2026 at 12:21:33 AM

I think we might about have the technology to build the bad thing blocking sunglasses now.

by totetsu

7/14/2026 at 12:58:02 PM

Love it.

And something I wish the current crop of AI startups learn as well, just making XYZ agentic maybe isn't the answer to everything.

Same folks that said crypto will destroy traditional finance are now saying stuff like, AI will "destroy" all jobs and create a permanent underclass. Almost feels like every few years a new cult gets created with messaging perfectly designed to trigger the Gen-Z(/current college generation) into a frenzy and drinking the kool-aid.

Can't wait for it to be over (and then to do it all over again with something else). Being in my 30s helps. I care less :)

by AdityaAnand1

7/14/2026 at 1:01:31 PM

Yeah. In the 90's it was outsourcing is going to move all software jobs to India. Turns out that did happen, but also not. Still, manufacturing jobs have actually left the USA.

by fragmede

7/14/2026 at 1:11:32 PM

I think there is something parasitic in both legacy media and actually even worse in new media - where it finds the most toxic, negative idea that can latch on to the minds of the masses and runs away with it.

Maybe "things going bad suddenly in the near future" is just such a captivating idea to the human mind that those narratives will always find a way to dominate vs "everything will continue to slowly get better".

by AdityaAnand1

7/14/2026 at 1:47:00 PM

Maybe things are going bad suddenly in the near future. For instance, the projected weather cycle later this year is four times as powerful as a Super El Niño. The US is one week away from running out of gasoline (was 4 weeks away, 3 weeks ago). Are these not things that should be reported?

by inigyou

7/14/2026 at 1:56:48 PM

I don’t think it’s about what should or shouldn’t be reported. It’s about your relationship to those things. If you wake up on July 21 and there are no headlines saying “The US has run out of gasoline, no driving!”, will you breathe a sigh of relief and be happy things weren’t that bad after all? Or will you browse the headlines for other scary things that might happen in the near future?

by SpicyLemonZest

7/14/2026 at 4:00:44 PM

>It’s about your relationship to those things.

The year 2000 problem is a good example of this. The year 2000 problem was not a problem. Not because it wasn't a problem, but because a shitload of people did a lot of work to make sure it wasn't a problem. If we didn't have news saying 'oh no, this is a problem' before Jan 1 2000, would it have been taken so seriously?

In February 2021 Texas was so incredibly close to losing the grid that it should strike terror into the hearts of anyone that lives there (see Practical Engineering episode on black starts). Simply put this would have been a massive humanitarian disaster in the 3rd largest state in the US of a size the US has not seen in the modern era. Thousands would have died from the extreme cold that was occuring. Thousands more from a lack of medicine. Fuel would have been trapped in the ground, and ran out quickly anyway. The loss of refining capabilities on the coast would have crippled the entire US. Because of the stupid design of the Texas grid it would have taken weeks or months to get everything back online.

The modern world has become very fragile due to long supply lines of necessary supplies. Covid did a good job of showing some of these weaknesses. I don't think the "did bad thing happen or not" is the way we should be looking at this. It's "How can we reduced the impact of bad things happening". And we're doing a terrible fucking job at it by consolidating companies and industries even further.

Maybe we should actually be worried about a billion+ death event in the near future because of our stupid decisions at a global scale. Maybe we should turn that fear into doing something into preventing it.

by pixl97

7/14/2026 at 6:23:19 PM

Speaking of grids, USA power companies are saying they'll have to start blacking out millions of homes within a year, to have enough power for AI DCs.

by inigyou

7/14/2026 at 6:28:25 PM

Hopefully we're still at the point that millions of pissed off voters are more important than the relatively small number of DCs.

by pixl97

7/15/2026 at 1:30:34 PM

If both parties are actively willing to do it anyway, then why do votes even matter?

by cyber_kinetist

7/14/2026 at 11:38:44 PM

We're still at the point where people who give money to politicians are infinitely more important than people who don't.

by inigyou

7/14/2026 at 3:29:25 PM

This is, IMO, quite the insightful thought experiment. I suspect, however, that it is very difficult for most people to face.

by rmah

7/14/2026 at 12:49:03 PM

I have found that it gets some of the "cruft" out of the work, freeing me to do more work.

Since starting to use LLMs, I have actually been spending more time, at the console, than before.

One reason is that I like to ship (as opposed to "code"). That means a lot of tedious, boring stuff. The kind of thing that I want to "take a break before tackling," so I may take 30 minutes, and watch something on TV for a while, before rolling up my sleeves.

Now, the LLM can take care of a lot of this stuff, so I am not motivated to "take a break," so much, anymore.

It doesn't actually feel bad, but I now have to schedule "downtime." I never used to have to do that, before. My work always involved a lot of "context switch" points; naturally set up for taking breaks.

by ChrisMarshallNY

7/14/2026 at 1:43:12 PM

Yeah I have found that AI in general has a procrastination nullifying effect.

Before dealing with anything that might put me off. I can just ask the agent to do it for me. And then, do something else, take that break, but regardless in a few minutes I will have something to jump on instead of the same blank terminal with the same blinking cursor judging me. It really makes taking the first step, much easier and then the ball just gets rolling.

I see what his point is to be honest though, it's easy to say just one more week of polish, just 5 more features, etc.

by throwawayffffas

7/15/2026 at 7:53:38 AM

It's the empty page problem.

For some people (most?) it's really hardhard, almost impossible, to fill the page with text, but when you have a page of text - even if it's shit - suddenly it's easy to critique it and interate to make it better.

AI lets me poop out an MVP out of any idea or spec with very little effort on my part, then I can go in and start improving it.

by theshrike79

7/15/2026 at 10:56:01 AM

> MVP

I guess a lot of folks are having better luck than I am, in getting ship-quality results from LLMs.

In my case, I find that the first iteration is almost never suitable for shipping. In fact, the more intricate the functionality, the more likely it is, to contain some real showstopper bugs.

In my experience, iteration really requires that I know my shit. I have to know what to look for, and how to form effective prompts. Testing is absolutely vital. I can’t ever “just assume” that the code is fundamentally sound; even for extremely basic stuff.

That lack of trust in my output is something I haven’t had, in decades. It can be a bit stressful.

For example, I write a lot of mobile software, so resource usage is a big deal. I had gotten used to not testing for battery usage, leaks, or out-of-control allocations, over the years of using Swift. I am now back to routinely running Instruments.

In a couple of instances, I was just unable to get anything useful from the LLM, had to toss all its output, and rewrite by hand.

That’s why I can’t even imagine directly shipping anything the LLM gives me.

That said, I have generally had extremely positive experiences with LLMs. It’s now a basic component of my workflow.

by ChrisMarshallNY

7/15/2026 at 1:35:05 PM

If you never ship, how can you iterate?

Do you spend weeks running benchmarks and optimising your code without asking/observing a single actual user whether they care if that bit is fast or not?

Or would it be more efficient to ship something, gather data and iterate where relevant?

Because if you're not doing that, I can guarantee other people are. Sadly being the first and moving fast (adding features as users request them) is in many cases better in the mobile market than having the snappiest app with zero memory leaks and excellent battery efficiency.

The whole Turkish mobile gaming industry works on this principle, they ship like crazy and iterate quickly to see what sticks.

by theshrike79

7/15/2026 at 4:39:55 PM

> If you never ship, how can you iterate?

Our discipline has swung way too far in this direction. The useful insight of "watch your users use your product -- you will always be surprised about something" has turned into "you cannot possibly have any vision or produce a useful product without constantly probing your users".

A/B testing, design by committee -- it reeks of cowardice and produces garbage. It reminds me of an SNL skit where politicians in a debate were able to see real-time social media responses to their talking points, and they immediately started playing a sort of "hotter/colder" game, changing their politics to try to get the graph to go up.

I promise you it's possible to just have an actual vision yourself. Yes, talking to users will surprise you, and it's important. But the idea that you cannot possibly iterate without shipping code is way, way too extreme.

by feoren

7/15/2026 at 5:33:51 PM

It’s an old concept, called “taking risks.” Corporations and executives have been doing it for centuries. In fact, that's the excuse that executives give, for their monstrous salaries.

I think we have a culture, where people genuinely believe that we have some “right” to a risk-free fortune.

Training users to pay for unripe garbage, is probably one of modern Marketing’s biggest coups. It affords the “MVP model,” that everyone uses.

The other big coup, is “The Company is the Product, the User is the Resource, and the Investor is the Customer” model.

Steve Jobs famously, made many errors, in his career. Probably most of his ideas were duds, but the ones that scored, scored big.

He was also, famously, a world-class prick; but he wasn’t a misanthropic prick. He actually liked people (certain ones, more than others, I guess), and had a way of understanding them. That figured prominently, in his product ideas. Many folks are misanthropes, and refuse to understand people, so they have difficulty coming up with ideas that people might like.

Taking risks, and "putting our money where our mouth is," is the “old-fashioned” way of doing it.

by ChrisMarshallNY

7/15/2026 at 7:56:55 PM

As much as I hate the veneration of Steve Jobs, this is one thing he was good at. Does anyone seriously think the iPod and iPhone would have ended up the way they were if he was putting half-assed music players with bare wires in the hands of users and going "do you like it? Is it OK? Would you buy this? What do you think? Is it too much? It's too much, isn't it? Should it be white? Is white OK? Do you like white? I noticed you didn't push the button. Do you like buttons?". Hell no. He took the prototype and said "Too clunky. Too big. I need to be able to lick it. It needs to feel better in my hand. Try again"

Yet not only do software developers do the timid design-by-focus-group all the time, they confidently tell you you're doing it wrong if you don't do it this way.

by feoren

7/15/2026 at 2:29:58 PM

It depends on the target market.

The mistake many people make, is casting what’s good for the goose, onto the gander.

I Serve a demographic that can suffer great harm, from half-baked crap. Also, there’s no money to be made, so what’s the hurry? If someone else comes up with something better, that’s actually a good thing.

I have been shipping software for my entire career. It’s quite possible to ship good stuff.

It’s just more work, and less financially rewarding, so fewer people do it. It just gets my goat, to hear people say that it’s not possible.

by ChrisMarshallNY

7/14/2026 at 8:26:13 PM

As someone who used to have an incredibly hard time putting my app in front of users, or asking for feedback, or getting rejected, etc:

Posts like this one always made me feel like I was a coward. Like there was.. unvirtuousness.. in not killing one’s darlings, not validating ideas, not quitting things in time, not looking for product-market fit.

I can report that looking for product-market fit, and everything else from the list above, became easier once I started taking antidepressants and adhd meds.

For example, it turns out deciding to punch yourself in the face with reality is much easier when you don’t feel, for example, like abandoning a project would be a giant betrayal and a thing one might in theory do but you must never do ever under any circumstances.

- - -

There are likely many people who have more capacity for self control, and who are genuinely helped by hearing moderately harsh truths because they can (1) take a look at their behavior, (2) realize it hurts them and their chances of success, (3) realize where they’ve been blind to reality, and (4) change.

I suspect that such people assume — maybe correctly in most cases — that if someone hasn’t done (4), it’s because they haven’t done enough (1-3), and this is the appropriate lever to push.

I don’t know how to finish this comment.

by neongreen

7/14/2026 at 8:33:37 PM

I wouldn't phrase it as cowardice or virtue.. it's just a skill you have to learn. I'm struggling with getting my project in front of users for a bit of a different reason, which is just that it's a bit of a specialty writing tool, and asking people to test it would also be asking them to do work with it (it's really the only way to know if it works for them or not), which is kind of a lift. My hope here is just that because I myself am a consumer of this and have worked in this space, my judgement will be similar to other's judgement. I hope!

by overgard

7/14/2026 at 12:03:34 PM

"Being honest with themselves about whether what they are doing is actually working or not" and "Having the courage to go on when nobody believes in you" are opposites.

by card_zero

7/14/2026 at 12:45:27 PM

> "Having the courage to go on when nobody believes in you"

If you're doing something that isn't like how people are used to things being done, is novel, or is contra to common beliefs, there's a good chance that nobody will believe in you. And in such situations, their lack of belief is not a reliable indicator of whether what you're doing is valid or correct. Most people's negative responses in such cases are emotional responses, not rational ones.

In such situations, "Being honest with themselves about whether what they are doing is actually working or not" and "Having the courage to go on when nobody believes in you" are not opposites.

by jamesrcole

7/14/2026 at 12:29:08 PM

Not if you're perfectly able to differentiate which things will eventually succeed rather than will always fail! The best strategy for "winning in the age of AI" is "be able to predict the future with perfect accuracy", which at least anecdotally quite a lot of people lately seem to think they are able to do lately.

Probably not so different from past hype cycles, except maybe this time it will be different!

by saghm

7/14/2026 at 12:05:32 PM

There's a difference.

The first is getting market feedback.

The second is just getting opinions.

by Schiendelman

7/14/2026 at 4:41:42 PM

If I listened to market feedback I would have delivered a faster horse.

by pixl97

7/14/2026 at 6:25:28 PM

That's exactly the opposite of what I'm saying. :) If you listened to opinion you'd deliver a faster horse. If you test the market with an idea, you get behavioral feedback.

by Schiendelman

7/14/2026 at 12:13:05 PM

Not quite. Optimism about where you are going doesn't conflict with being able to accurately assess where you currently are.

It does require you to think carefully about what constitutes validation or invalidation of your ideas, though.

by pjc50

7/14/2026 at 6:04:15 PM

No, they're actually the same thing: making an honest assessment of reality. In the first case you're doing so to prevent self-delusion. In the second you're doing so to prevent others from clouding your judgment.

by _moof

7/14/2026 at 1:17:17 PM

Not really. You can be honest about something working and others can disagree with your assessment.

by lo_zamoyski

7/14/2026 at 1:47:29 PM

In this context "working" means selling. If you're selling the product that means that others are on board.

by vanviegen

7/14/2026 at 8:17:30 PM

While it's true that unsupervised AIs build a heap of trash, I have to admit, it doesn't look much worse than some of the code I saw powering products that sold for millions.

The only thing that changed is the scale.

by k__

7/14/2026 at 12:36:04 PM

Such a great synopsis. The things that are easy to signal (landing page, presentation deck, logo, etc) have never been the make-or-break aspect. The part that's always been hard, that remains hard, is that a business must solve a problem for people. Even B2B is solving business problems for specific people. And people are a difficult, difficult problem to solve.

by quirkot

7/14/2026 at 12:46:49 PM

My previous business failed. Everything we built was useless. 2.5 yrs.

My current business is profitable. Almost everything we built was still useless. Since 4 yrs ago.

The amount of effort that went into that "almost" Is something that I don't think AI moved any needle for even though half of our journey was after AI coding took off.

Speed of coding was never the problem, still isn't even if AI allegedly 10x-ed it.

by AdityaAnand1

7/14/2026 at 2:49:29 PM

Is it really? Most startups don't seem to solve anything for anyone, not really, but they do enough to get investor money, using pitch decks and logos and landing pages, and the founder gets paid from investor money while the product collapses, which seems like a success for the founders to me.

by inigyou

7/14/2026 at 3:34:56 PM

Many startups simply solve the following problem: Rich person has a massive amount of money, and wants to use some of that to chase risky returns. They don't really know what to do with it, so they become an LP and act as part of a risk sink for crazy ideas. In that way, the pitch decks, logos, landing pages, and breathless hype is, itself, the "problem" in the process of being solved.

by ryandrake

7/14/2026 at 4:20:43 PM

You can gamify anything. The concept of VC is sound.

by alansaber

7/14/2026 at 3:12:39 PM

The goal isn't solving a problem (for founders) but to get investor money. The VC system is designed to 100x investments.

People who solve problems while being profitable do not take investment money unless they want to expand or sell.

"What is the exit?" that is the question for every startup.

by pizzafeelsright

7/14/2026 at 5:26:46 PM

> Who can punch themselves in the face with reality the most? This is who will win in the age of AI.

Reminds me of a politician in India who would ask elders in his family to slap him hard before he starts out on the election campaigns. He says that the slaps are meant to keep him alert and honest.

by zkmon

7/14/2026 at 6:39:45 PM

Pain is a powerful teacher. I have grown the most when I hurt.

by all2

7/14/2026 at 8:34:11 PM

I'm a creative person so my brain requires that I make something every day. Sometimes I make stuff that isn't very good. I've been told a lot by former bosses and random people that my desire to build stuff is frivolous. I could punch myself in the face with this reality, but then I would stop building.

by mips_avatar

7/14/2026 at 3:46:47 PM

> I have seen way too many startup founders delude themselves into building more and more for months without a single conversation with a real user

This has been a problem since the beginning of tech startups. I worked in a dot-com in the late 1990s. Lots of investor money. New offices. Hundreds of employees. The product was well thought out, fairly well built, and it worked. But they had no customers. It's even in the same market niche as products that today have millions of users, but those folks weren't ready for it in 1999, at least not enough of them and quickly enough to matter.

Building something quickly is only a small part of what it takes to have a successful startup. You must solve a problem for people who are ready for your solution and willing to pay for it.

by SoftTalker

7/14/2026 at 4:45:03 PM

Hence marketing in making people want it.

So you have two options, be good at making people want to spend money on something. This is pretty hard and a rare capability.

The other is to watch trends and catch what people want now, and be ready to deliver a product that does that....

by pixl97

7/14/2026 at 8:17:31 PM

Really at that time the internet was still a novelty and too hard to use for many people. Remember this was before smartphones, a lot of people were still on dial-up, which added tremendous friction to using online services. Many households didn't even have a PC that could get online. Facebook didn't exist. Amazon had just started to expand beyond being an online bookstore. The investment bubble and hype were too far ahead of the reality and patience ran out.

by SoftTalker

7/14/2026 at 8:49:31 PM

AI has made it easier than ever to avoid customers while feeling incredibly productive.

by jamie_royce

7/14/2026 at 5:51:42 PM

> If all you know is how to build, and you just use AI as an excuse to keep building more and more and more, you are just procrastinating and avoiding reality.

I’ve had this sense about AI for a while now and this articulates that feeling far better than I’ve been able to.

by jimbokun

7/14/2026 at 6:38:57 PM

If 90% of tech startups failed in the past, AI pushes that that rate to over 99%.

Cloud was like this too. You spent all this money as a startup with AWS regardless of whether you made a dollar or not.

by 01284a7e

7/14/2026 at 12:34:22 PM

>Figure out why you were put on this earth.

Who is responsible for this mess? ;)

by andai

7/14/2026 at 1:49:18 PM

Nobody. We're just here. Mentally healthy human adults have ways to avoid thinking about the terrifying reality of infinite potential being restricted by a finite lifespan of decay, but not everyone is mentally healthy all the time.

by inigyou

7/15/2026 at 10:14:20 AM

Thanks. I was making simultaneous reference to Half-Life 1 (where the scientists keep asking "who is responsible for this mess?" and the humorous implication is that the player himself is the one responsible — having inserted the crystal into the laser or whatever), and the recordings of Alan Watts, in one of which he mentions the parents love to project lots of guilt onto their child but... Of course the one responsible for the child's existence are the parents. "They know what they did!" Hahaha

by andai

7/14/2026 at 4:21:34 PM

Ah, so this is why oldschool runescape is still popular

by alansaber

7/14/2026 at 1:57:06 PM

I feel bruised

by smcg

7/14/2026 at 3:03:35 PM

Same

by vertias3u

7/14/2026 at 3:19:31 PM

Reminds me of the part in "Silicon Valley" where they launched and couldn't figure out why no-one (except engineers) became real users.

by OlavKoefoed

7/14/2026 at 2:56:44 PM

No this isn't punching yourself in the face. Not for swes.

What's written above is self confirmation that you are better than AI and that you will always have a job because you are better because AI can't build something that works. That stuff about convincing yourself you're building something useful is actually the easy question.

Punching yourself in the face involves telling truths that are incredibly hard to stomach. That you don't matter, that all your years of coding and your identity is about to be consumed by a machine that is superior. The fact that you still hold a rank as a software engineer right now is only because that machine is slightly worse than you. But as it improves, your role becomes meaningless. The life you built your skills around becomes meaningless. It is less about what AI is now and more about the trajectory of AI and what the current AI says about the AI of the near tomorrow. We don't code by hand anymore and this came about in less than 5 years since the popular rise of LLMs. Think about what the next 5 years will bring.

That is punching yourself in the face with reality^^

by threethirtytwo

7/14/2026 at 5:58:29 PM

> We don't code by hand anymore

/usr/bin/vim on my machine begs to differ.

by zahlman

7/14/2026 at 8:38:04 PM

What even motivates you to write something like this? In what universe is a software engineer a "rank"? You sound absurdly bitter that people want to keep their livelihood?

This doesn't even match with reality. I got laid off in January because of "ai" (scare quotes because it was really about the salaries of the US based teams being more expensive than the overseas teams, I think). I got hired at a new job with better pay within two months, and my team is still hiring software engineers, and we work on cutting edge stuff. And yes we use AI (tastefully), but nobody here expects it to replace them. Hacker News and twitter are a fricking echo chamber of the most obnoxious people trying to be "thought leaders", but it doesn't match my reality at all.

by overgard

7/14/2026 at 11:20:17 PM

This guy's head will explode when he realizes that AI has been better at coding than humans for years and yet software engineering employment % has barely twitched...

by holtkam2

7/14/2026 at 11:52:51 PM

? Claude code didn't get very useable until about 4.5 - and its still not better than the best humans - only faster to first implementation.

You must have a different definition of most of the words you used than I do.

by layla5alive

7/14/2026 at 6:08:09 PM

[dead]

by itsautocomplete

7/14/2026 at 4:57:44 PM

"Nature cannot be fooled"

by ReactiveJelly

7/14/2026 at 9:25:59 PM

[flagged]

by cryptokent

7/14/2026 at 5:22:59 PM

[dead]

by syed_qutub3

7/14/2026 at 1:41:53 PM

[dead]

by fuckaiwriter

7/14/2026 at 2:49:35 PM

Click biat. Sorry.

by bana-io