I think it's a bad analogy. For one - smoking does very high permanent damage to a car interior.

Two - the usage pattern was Shaun's toc but not obviously against the spirit.

More like "you can use my car to drive around as much as you want" And then going: Obviously I didn't mean driving to another coast on a highway

More like "you can use my car to drive around as much as you want so long as you don't drive to another coast on a highway" and then you drive to another coast on a highway and get mad when I won't give you my car next time.

This exactly. I'm using 10% of my max plan on the weeks that I'm working a lot. Hit a 4-hour limit once over few months and never let it run overnight. And I'm very happy with my subscription

The ban hammer is the scary part.

I am afraid of using any Google services in experimental way from the fear that my whole Google existence will be banned.

I think blocking access temporarily with a warning would be much more suitable. Unblocking could be even conditioned on a request to pay for the abused tokens

No, it's more like stuffing your pockets in all-you-can-eat buffet

I don't know what is your bubble, but I'm a regular programmer and I'm absolutely excited even if a little uncomfortable. I know a lot of people who are the same.

Interesting, every developer I've spoken to is extremely skeptical and has not found any actual productivity boosts.

Ok that's not true. I know one junior who is very excited, but considering his regular code quality I would not put much weight on his opinion.

I am using AI a lot to do tasks that just would not get done because they would take too long. Also, getting it to iterate on a React web application meant I can think about what I want it to do rather than worry about all the typing I would have to do. Especially powerful when moving things around, hand-written code has a "mental load" to move that telling an AI to do it does not. Obviously not everything is 100% but this is the most productive I have felt for a very long time. And I've been in the game for 25 years.

Why do you need to move things around? And how is that difficult?

Surely you have an LSP in your editor and are able to use sed? I've never had moving files take more than fifteen minutes (for really big changes), and even then most of the time is spent thinking about where to move things.

LLM's have been reported to specifically make you "feel" productive without actually increasing your productivity.

I mean there are two different things. One is whether there are actual productivity boosts right now. And the second is the excitement about the technology.

I am definitely more productive. A lot of this productivity is wasted on stuff I probably shouldn't be writing anyways. But since using coding agent, I'm both more productive at my day job and I'm building so many small hobby projects that I would have never found time for otherwise.

But the main topic of discussion in this thread is the excitement about technology. And I have a bit mixed feelings, because on one hand side I feel like a turkey being excited for the Thanksgiving. On the other hand, I think the programming future is bright. there will be so much more software build and for a lot of that you will still need programmers.

My excitement comes from the fact that I can do so much more things that I wouldn't even think about being able to do a few months ago.

Just as an example, in last month I have used the agents to add features to the applications I'm using daily. Text editor, podcast application, Android keyboard. The agents were capable to fork, build, and implement a feature I asked for in a project where I have no idea about the technology. Iif I were hired to do those features, I would be happy if I implemented them after two weeks on the job. With an agent, I get tailor made features in half of a morning. Spending less than ten minutes prompting.

I am building educational games for my kids. They learn a new topic at school? Let me quickly vibe the game to make learning it fun. A project that wouldn't be worth my weekend, but is worth 15 minutes. https://kuboble.com/math/games/snake/index.html?mode=multipl...

So I'm excited because I think coding agents will be for coding what pencil and paper were for writing.

I don't understand the idea that you "could not think about implementing a feature".

I can think of roughly 0 fratures of run-of-the-mill software that would be impossible to implement for a semi-competent software developer. Especially for the kinds of applications you mention.

Also it sounds less like you're productive and more like the vibeslop projects are distracting you.

I'm claiming it's both.

I produce more good (imo) production features despite being distracted.

The features I mention is something that I would be able to do, but only with a lot of learning and great effort - so in practical terms I would not.

It is probably a skill issue but in the past many times I downloaded the open source project and just couldn't build and run it. Cryptic build errors, figuring out dependencies. And I see claude gets the same errors but he just knows how to work around those errors. Setting up local development environment (db, dummy auth, dummy data) for a project outside of my competence area is already more work than I'm willing to do for a simple feature. Now it's free.

>I can think of roughly 0 fratures of run-of-the-mill software that would be impossible to implement for a semi-competent software developer.

Yes. I'm my area of competence it can do the coding tasks I know exactly how to do just a bit faster. Right now for those tasks I'd say it can one shot code that would take me a day.

But it enables me to do things in the area where I don't have expertise. And getting this expertise is very expensive.

Out of interest, could you give me an example of a feature that it one-shotted that would have taken you a whole day?

The example from yesterday:

I have a large C# application. In this application I have a functionality to convert some group of settings into a tree model (a list of commands to generate this tree). There are a lot of weird settings and special cases.

I asked claude to extract this logic into a separate python module.

It succesfully one-shot that, and I would estimate it as 2 days work for me (and I wrote the original C# code).

This is probabaly the best possible kind of task for the coding agents, given that it's very well defined task with already existing testcases.

Seems reasonable, but if it's just copy pasting, doesn't seem like that would take you a whole day. Maybe on the order of an hour at most.

Were you exaggerating earlier or do you have more examples?

This is a two-day task for me. If you could do it in one hour, then you're a 10x programmer compared to me.

You can browse the code at <my_username>.com/slop/hn_tb/

I have also sloped the simple code viewer. So you can make your judgement if it looks like 1 hour task.

I think it's worth a read in current times of agentic models swarming the world.

It's the novel the whole biological life is wiped of Earth but the servers keep churming with (kind of) LLM agents. The LLMS find a way to keep their world going for centuries.

Basically a lot of use cases where you would hire a human without giving him access to your sensitive information.

From perfectly benign things like gathering chats from Discord servers to learn how your brand is perceived. To more nefarious things like creating swarms of fake people pushing your agenda.

build a personality that loves cats, gardening and knitting. Create accounts on discord, reddit and Twitter. participate in communities, upvote posts, comment sporadically in area of your expertise, once in a month casually mention the agenda.

What resonates the most with me in the article is this quote

> I was so naïve that I thought progress could only go one direction, because that’s all I’d ever known.

As kids growing up in Eastern Europe in the 80s and 90s the world felt like its getting better every year. More peace, fewer borders, more opportunities, better technology.

Everything was getting better every year and we took it for granted that this is a law of nature.

I kinda think I am lucky to spend my whole life in a rather peaceful, prosperous time. But the good time is almost over.

I think many of us take it for granted. I wonder what the view on the ground was in the late 1930's and early 1940's.

Or a more recent time. I think how mechanical engineers felt in silicon valley over the last 40 years as basically 'making and shipping" was all exported to china. I have some mechanical engineer friends whose life got smaller and smaller.

My brother in Brazil graduated in a world where Mechanical Engineers were needed a lot, but the decline was already going on, unbeknownst to most. During his career it just got harder and harder to change jobs, until after a second or third layoff he had enough and migrated to Australia. I wasn’t so sure he would succeed since at the time, all car companies were closing down (Mitsubishi first, then Ford a finally even Holden, the pride of Australian car industry). Somehow, though, he had several opportunities and is still working on a very good job. I suppose he might be one the last few able to have a lifetime career in this field.

I can tell you from Portuguese point of view, I could have studied close to home, but that would mean EE, and most interesting jobs in the early 1990's were already leaving the country, and unless one hit gold with Portugal Telecom, there were very few alternatives in a couple of factories or repair shops, and most EEs ended up doing coding.

Thus I went directly to Informatics Engineering and 300 km away.

Now were the ones into the line of sight of late capitalism.

But, overall, the world has been steadily improving from century to century (largely thanks to technology).

The catch is that the path there are occasional local minima, and very deep local minima, like the world wars

Very true.

I have seem stuff like "you can use my program if you will make me a co-author".

That usually comes up with some support usually.

I used notepad as my default, simple text editor for ages.

After they added copilot I finally gave up and uninstalled it and switched to a one of the minimalistic clones of the good old notepad.exe