| ▲ | cmiles8 16 hours ago |
| The “anti-AU hype” phrase oversimplifies what’s playing out at the moment. On the tech side, while things are a bit rough around the edges still the tech is very useful and isn’t going away. I honestly don’t see much disagreement there. The concern mostly comes from the business side… that for all the usefulness on the tech there is no clearly viable path that financially supports everything that’s going on. It’s a nice set of useful features but without products with sufficient revenue flowing in to pay for it all. That paints a picture of the tech sticking around but a general implosion of the startups and business models betting on making all this work. The later isn’t really “anti-AI hype” but more folks just calling out the reality that there’s not a lot of evidence and data to support the amount of money invested and committed. And if you’ve been around the tech and business scene a while you’ve seen that movie before and know what comes next. In 5 years time I expect to be using AI more than I do now. I also expect most of the AI companies and startups won’t exist anymore. |
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| ▲ | nielsole 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| In the late 2000s i remember that "nobody is willing to pay for things on the Internet" was a common trope.
I think it'll culturally take a while before businesses and people understand what they are willing to pay for. For example if you are a large business and you pay xxxxx-xxxxxx per year per developer, but are only willing to pay xxx per year in AI tooling, something's out of proportion. |
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| ▲ | embedding-shape 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > For example if you are a large business and you pay xxxxx-xxxxxx per year per developer, but are only willing to pay xxx per year in AI tooling, something's out of proportion. One is the time of a human (irreplaceable) and the other is a tool for some human to use, seems proportional to me. | | |
| ▲ | thunky 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | > human (irreplaceable) Everyone is replaceable. Software devs aren't special. | | |
| ▲ | reppap 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Domain knowledge is a real thing. Sure I could be replaced at my job but they'd have a pretty sketchy time until someone new can get up to speed. | |
| ▲ | embedding-shape 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes, with another human. I meant more that you cannot replace a human with a non-human, at least not yet and if you care about quality. |
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| ▲ | qcnguy 9 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Late 1990s maybe. Not late 2000s. |
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| ▲ | antirez 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The blog post title is a joke about the AI hype. |
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| ▲ | iLoveOncall 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | Well it completely misses the mark, because your whole article IS hyping up AI, and probably more than anything I've seen before honestly. If it's all meant to be ironical, it's a huge failure and people will use it to support their AI hype. | | |
| ▲ | antirez 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | I was not clear enough. I wanted to write a PRO-AI blog post. The people against AI always say negative things with using as central argument that "AI is hyped and overhyped". So I, for fun, consider the anti-AI movement a form of hype. It's a joke but not in the sense it does not mean what it means. | | |
| ▲ | somewhereoutth an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | However, as you point out, anti-AI people are pushing back against hype, not indulging in hype themselves - not least as nobody is trying to sell 'not-AI'. I for one look forward to the next AI winter, which I hope will be long, deep, and savage. | |
| ▲ | iLoveOncall 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | simonw 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Anyone claiming "Writing code is no longer needed for the most part" is not a serious software engineer. You need to recalibrate. Six months ago I would have agreed with you, but Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2 represent a very real change. I would phrase this as "typing the code out by hand is no longer needed for the most part", which I think is what antirez was getting at here. | | |
| ▲ | iLoveOncall 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | And I'm sure if you go back to the release of 3.5, you'll see the exact same comments. And when 5 comes out, I'm sure I'll see you commenting "OK I agree 6 months ago but now with Claude 5 Opus it's great". It's really the weirdest type of goalpost moving. I have used Opus 4.5 a lot lately and it's garbage, absolutely useless for anything beyond generating trivial shit for which I'd anyway use a library or have it already integrated in the framework I use. I think the real reason your opinion has changed in 6 months is because your skills have atrophyed. It's all as bad as 6 months ago, and even as bad as 2 years ago, you've just become worse. | | |
| ▲ | simonw 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | > And I'm sure if you go back to the release of 3.5, you'll see the exact same comments. Not from people whose opinions on that I respect. Credible software developers I know were impressed by Claude 3.5 but none of them were saying "I don't type out code by hand any more". Now they are. If you think LLMs today are "as bad as 2 years ago" then I don't respect your opinion. That's not a credible thing to say. | | |
| ▲ | iLoveOncall 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > Not from people whose opinions on that I respect. Then you shouldn't respect Antirez's opinion, because he wrote articles saying just that 2 years ago. > If you think LLMs today are "as bad as 2 years ago" then I don't respect your opinion. That's not a credible thing to say. You are getting fooled by longer context windows and better tooling around the LLMs. The models themselves have definitely not gotten better. In fact it's easy to test, just give the exact same prompt to 3.5 and 4.5, and receive the exact same answer. The only difference is that when you used to copy-paste answers from the ChatGPT UI, you now have it integrated in your IDE (with the added bonus of it being able to empty your wallet much quicker). It's a faster process, not a better one. I'd even argue it's worse, since you spend less time reviewing the LLM's answer in this situation. How do you explain that it's so easy to tell (in a bad way) when a PR is AI-generated if it's not necessary to code by hand anymore? | | |
| ▲ | simonw 13 hours ago | parent [-] | | Claude 3.5 didn't have "reasoning" - Anthropic first added that in 3.7 less than a year ago. The RL for code problems that supported reasoning modes has been the driving force behind most of the model improvements for code over 2025: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/31/the-year-in-llms/#the-... > Then you shouldn't respect Antirez's opinion, because he wrote articles saying just that 2 years ago. Which articles? What did he say? https://antirez.com/news/154 is one from six months ago where he says: > Despite the large interest in agents that can code alone, right now you can maximize your impact as a software developer by using LLMs in an explicit way, staying in the loop. |
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| ▲ | pydry 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | >If you think LLMs today are "as bad as 2 years ago" then I don't respect your opinion. That's not a credible thing to say. This exact comment started getting old a year ago. | | |
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| ▲ | menaerus 14 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | What's wrong with you? Let people express their experience without calling them mentally ill. Put yourself together. | | |
| ▲ | zahlman 10 hours ago | parent [-] | | The comment was flagged and killed; the system works. Please don't respond to personal attacks with personal attacks. | | |
| ▲ | menaerus 8 hours ago | parent [-] | | Personal attack for calling out the hostility? And btw it was not flagged nor killed at the moment when I wrote my comment. | | |
| ▲ | zahlman 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Language like "What's wrong with you?" is a clear personal attack. |
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| ▲ | danielbln 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | There are too many people who see the absurd AI hype (especially absurd in terms of investment) and construct a counter-argument with it that AI is useless, overblown and just generally not good. And that's a fallacy. Two things can be true at the same time. Coding agents are a step change and immensely useful, and the valuations and breathless AGI evangelizing is a smoke screen and pure hype. Don't let hype deter you to get your own hands dirty and try shit. |
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| ▲ | dist-epoch 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| People said the exact same thing about (numbers from memory, might be off): - when Google paid $1 bil for YouTube - when Facebook paid $1 bil for Instagram - when Facebook paid $1 bil for WhatsApp The same thing - these 3 companies make no money, and have no path to making money, and that the price paid was crazy and decoupled from any economics. Yet now, in hindsight, they look like brilliant business decisions. |
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| ▲ | jakeydus 4 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias?wprov=sfti1 | |
| ▲ | qcnguy 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | We don't really know how much money Google sunk into YouTube before it became (presumably) profitable. It might have actually not been strongly coupled to economics. | | |
| ▲ | Izkata 7 hours ago | parent [-] | | Also they attempted their own competitor before buying YouTube, called Google Video. It never got very popular. |
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| ▲ | ThrowawayR2 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | You listed only acquisitions that paid off and not the many, many more that didn't though. | |
| ▲ | cmiles8 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | There’s no comparison to what’s going on now vs those examples. Not even remotely similar. | | |
| ▲ | dist-epoch 15 hours ago | parent [-] | | > that for all the usefulness on the tech there is no clearly viable path that financially supports everything that’s going on you lack imagination, human workers are paid globally over $10 trillion dollars. |
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| ▲ | senordevnyc 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| On the tech side, while things are a bit rough around the edges still the tech is very useful and isn’t going away. I honestly don’t see much disagreement there. What? HN is absolutely packed with people complaining about LLMs are nothing more than net useless creators of slop. Granted, fewer than six months ago, which should tell people something... |
